---
title: "GraphRel — paper by Fu et al. (2019) — summary and ideas"
description: "GraphRel targets joint extraction of entities and relation triplets from raw sentences. 0.6% precision. 29 references, cited by 67 papers here."
authors: ["Tsu-Jui Fu", "Peng-Hsuan Li", "Wei-Yun Ma"]
year: 2019
venue: "Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/P19-1136/"
doi: "10.18653/v1/p19-1136"
licence: "CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/fu-2019-graphrel-modeling-text-as-relational/"
---
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# GraphRel: Modeling Text as Relational Graphs for Joint Entity and Relation Extraction

**Authors:** Tsu-Jui Fu, Peng-Hsuan Li and Wei-Yun Ma · **Year:** 2019 · **Venue:** [Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/acl/) ([ACL 2019](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/acl/2019/)) · **Publisher:** [Association for Computational Linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/publishers/association-for-computational-linguistics/) · **Licence:** [CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/P19-1136/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/P19-1136.pdf) · [DOI 10.18653/v1/p19-1136](https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/p19-1136) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2949212908)

**Citations:** 447 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14) · [67](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/fu-2019-graphrel-modeling-text-as-relational/cited-by/) in our library, of the 141,840 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
GraphRel targets joint extraction of entities and relation triplets from raw sentences. It addresses three problems that earlier systems did not solve together: recognizing entities and relations in a single end-to-end model, handling triplets that share entity mentions (overlapping relations), and modeling how relations influence each other.

The model first encodes words with GloVe and POS embeddings fed into a Bi-LSTM. A bidirectional GCN then runs over a dependency parse, so each word captures both sequential and syntactic-neighborhood context. In this first phase, the model tags entities and scores every directed word pair for every relation type. Because predictions are made per word pair, shared mentions are no longer a barrier. In the second phase, these scores serve as edge weights in a complete graph built for each relation. A relation-weighted GCN passes information across this graph before the final classification.

On NYT and WebNLG, GraphRel raises recall substantially without sacrificing precision. It sets a new state-of-the-art, with F1 gains of 3.2% and 5.8% over earlier work.

## Key points
- **Datasets and baselines:** Evaluated on NYT and WebNLG against NovelTagging and the seq2seq OneDecoder/MultiDecoder models. GraphRel improves on every overlap category (normal, EntityPairOverlap, SingleEntityOverlap).
- **Gains by triplet type and count:** On WebNLG, the first-phase model alone surpasses MultiDecoder by 3.5% (normal), 2.9% (EPO) and 3.4% (SEO). For sentences with many triplets, the two-phase model leads MultiDecoder by 11.1% on NYT.
- **Best configuration:** Two first-phase GCN layers plus one relation-weighted layer gives relation F1 of 61.9% on NYT and 42.9% on WebNLG. Adding more layers or a third phase brings no further improvement.
- **Entity recognition:** The second phase also improves entity tagging, with F1 rising from 88.8% to 89.2% on NYT and from 89.1% to 91.9% on WebNLG.
- **Threshold-based inference:** This decoding method outperforms head and average decoding. Lowering θ from 0.8 to 0 increases recall by 1.8% on NYT and 1.4% on WebNLG, at a cost of only about 0.6% precision.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

## Institutions

- [Academia Sinica](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/labs/academia-sinica/) — Research institute, Taipei, Taiwan · 5 works · 737 citations

📚 Shelves (4): [🖥️ Computer Science](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/computer-science/) · 9,085 works · [🤖 Artificial Intelligence](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/computer-science/artificial-intelligence/) · 8,888 works · [🎭 Arts and Humanities](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/arts-and-humanities/) · 9,296 works · [🗣️ Language and Linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/arts-and-humanities/language-and-linguistics/) · 9,206 works

🧭 Topics (1): [🔎 Information extraction](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/information-extraction/) · 109 works

## Cite

Cite as: Tsu-Jui Fu, Peng-Hsuan Li and Wei-Yun Ma. 2019. GraphRel: Modeling Text as Relational Graphs for Joint Entity and Relation Extraction. Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{fu2019graphrel,
  title = {{GraphRel: Modeling Text as Relational Graphs for Joint Entity and Relation Extraction}},
  author = {Tsu-Jui Fu, Peng-Hsuan Li and Wei-Yun Ma},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics},
  year = {2019},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/p19-1136},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/p19-1136}
}
```

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## References

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*Updated 24 October 2026*