Adversarial Multi-Teacher Distillation for Semi-Supervised Relation Extraction

The shortage of labeled data has been a long-standing challenge for relation extraction (RE) tasks. Semi-supervised RE (SSRE) is a promising way through annotating unlabeled samples with pseudolabels as additional training data. However, some pseudolabels on unlabeled data might be erroneous and will bring misleading knowledge into SSRE models. For this reason, we propose a novel adversarial multi-teacher distillation (AMTD) framework, which includes multi-teacher knowledge distillation and adversarial training (AT), to capture the knowledge on unlabeled data in a refined way. Specifically, we first develop a general knowledge distillation (KD) technique to learn not only from pseudolabels but also from the class distribution of predictions by different models in existing SSRE methods. To improve the robustness of the model, we further empower the distillation process with a language model-based AT technique. Extensive experimental results on two public datasets demonstrate that our framework significantly promotes the performance of the base SSRE methods.