Cited by 168Topic ModelingNatural Language Processing TechniquesMultimodal Machine Learning Applications

A comprehensive survey on relation extraction: recent advances and new frontiers

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Zhao, Xiaoyan, Deng, Yang, Yang, Min, Wang, Lingzhi, Zhang, Rui, Cheng, Hong, Lam, Wai, Shen, Ying +1 more·2024·ACM Computing Surveys

Abstract

Relation extraction (RE) involves identifying the relations between entities from underlying content. RE serves as the foundation for many natural language processing (NLP) and information retrieval applications, such as knowledge graph completion and question answering. In recent years, deep neural networks have dominated the field of RE and made noticeable progress. Subsequently, the large pre-trained language models (PLMs) have taken the state-of-the-art RE to a new level. This survey provides a comprehensive review of existing deep learning techniques for RE. First, we introduce RE resources, including datasets and evaluation metrics. Second, we propose a new taxonomy to categorize existing works from three perspectives, i.e., text representation, context encoding, and triplet prediction. Third, we discuss several important challenges faced by RE and summarize potential techniques to tackle these challenges. Finally, we outline some promising future directions and prospects in this field. This survey is expected to facilitate researchers’ collaborative efforts to address the challenges of real-world RE systems.

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Crossref · 10.1145/3674501

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  • LLMs have advantages including support for information extraction and synthesis, fact checking, multilingual analysis, and decision-support assistants, but also important limitations in uncertainty handling, self-assessment, and metacognitive reliability in high-stakes settings.

    “While acknowledging various advantages of LLMs (Choi and Ferrara, 2024; Zhao et al., 2024), including their support for information extraction and synthesis, facts checking, multilingual analysis, and decision-support assistants, recent work (Griot et al., 2025) has also highlighted their important limitations in uncertainty handling, self-assessment, and metacognitive reliability in high-stakes”

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Authors
Zhao, X., Deng, Y., Yang, M., Wang, L., Zhang, R., Cheng, H., Lam, W., Shen, Y., & Xu, R.
Affiliations
  • Chinese University of Hong Kong (HK)
  • Singapore Management University (SG)
  • Chinese Academy of Sciences (CN)
  • Huazhong University of Science and Technology (CN)
  • Sun Yat-sen University (CN)
  • Harbin Institute of Technology (CN)
Venue
ACM Computing Surveys
Published
2024-07-22
Volume
56
Issue
11
Pages
1-39
ISSN
  • 0360-0300 (ISSN-L)
  • 1557-7341
OpenAlex
W4399978597
Cited by
168
References
154
Citations by year
2026: 66 · 2025: 89 · 2024: 13
FWCI
24.74
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • ACM Computing Surveys (publishedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • Singapore Management University Institutional Knowledge (InK) (Singapore Management University) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Funders
  • Research Grant Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (CUHK 14217622)
  • National Key Research and Development Program of China (2022YFF0902100)
  • National Natural Science Foundation of China (62376262)
  • Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province of China (2024A1515030166)
  • Shenzhen Science and Technology Innovation Program (KQTD20190929172835662)
  • Shenzhen Basic Research Foundation (JCYJ20210324115614039)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Topic Modeling
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Natural Language Processing Techniques
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Multimodal Machine Learning Applications
Keywords
relation extraction, entity relationships, pre-trained language models, knowledge graph completion, question answering, evaluation metrics, text representation, context encoding

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