Multi-Task Identification of Entities, Relations, and Coreference for Scientific Knowledge Graph Construction

We introduce a multi-task setup of identifying and classifying entities, relations, and coreference clusters in scientific articles. We create SciERC, a dataset that includes annotations for all three tasks and develop a unified framework called Scientific Information Extractor (SciIE) for with shared span representations.

The multi-task setup reduces cascading errors between tasks and leverages cross-sentence relations through coreference links. Experiments show that our multi-task model outperforms previous models in scientific information extraction without using any domain-specific features.

We further show that the framework supports construction of a scientific knowledge graph, which we use to analyze information in scientific literature.