Generalized Framework for Syntax-Based Relation Mining

Supervised approaches to data mining are particularly appealing as they allow for the extraction of complex relations from data objects. In order to facilitate their application in different areas, ranging from protein to protein interaction in bioinformatics to text mining in computational linguistics research, a modular and general mining framework is needed. The major constraint to the generalization process concerns the feature design for the description of relational data. In this paper, we present a machine learning framework for the automatic mining of relations, where the target objects are structurally organized in a tree. Object types are generalized by means of the use of roles, whereas the relation properties are described by means of the underlying tree structure. The latter is encoded in the learning algorithm thanks to kernel methods for structured data, which represent structures in terms of their all possible subparts. This approach can be applied to any kind of data disregarding their very nature. Experiments with support vector machines on two text mining datasets for relation extraction, i.e. the PropBank and FrameNet corpora, show both that our approach is general, and that it reaches state-of-the-art accuracy.