CARE: Co-Attention Network for Joint Entity and Relation Extraction

Joint entity and relation extraction is the fundamental task of information extraction, consisting of two subtasks: named entity recognition and relation extraction. Most existing joint extraction methods suffer from issues of feature confusion or inadequate interaction between two subtasks. In this work, we propose a Co-Attention network for joint entity and Relation Extraction (CARE). Our approach involves learning separate representations for each subtask, aiming to avoid feature overlap. At the core of our approach is the co-attention module that captures two-way interaction between two subtasks, allowing the model to leverage entity information for relation prediction and vice versa, thus promoting mutual enhancement. Extensive experiments on three joint entity-relation extraction benchmark datasets (NYT, WebNLG and SciERC) show that our proposed model achieves superior performance, surpassing existing baseline models.