Relation extraction, a fundamental task in natural language processing, aims to extract entity triples from unstructured data. These triples can then be used to build a knowledge graph. Recently, pre-training models that have learned prior semantic and syntactic knowledge, such as BERT and ERNIE, have enhanced the performance of relation extraction tasks. However, previous research has mainly focused on sequential or structural data alone, such as the shortest dependency path, ignoring the fact that fusing sequential and structural features may improve the classification performance. This study proposes a concise approach using the fused features for the relation extraction task. Firstly, for the sequential data, we verify in detail which of the generated representations can effectively improve the performance. Secondly, inspired by the pre-training task of next-sentence prediction, we propose a concise relation extraction approach based on the fusion of sequential and structural features using the pre-training model ERNIE. The experiments were conducted on the SemEval 2010 Task 8 dataset and the results show that the proposed method can improve the F1 value to 0.902.

Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) acquire rich prior semantic knowledge during the pretraining phase and utilize it to enhance downstream Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Entity Matching (EM), a fundamental NLP task, aims to determine whether two entity records from different knowledge bases refer to the same real-world entity. This study, for the first time, explores the potential of using a PLM to boost the EM task through two transfer learning techniques, namely, fine-tuning and prompt learning. Our work also represents the first application of the soft prompt in an EM task. Experimental results across eleven EM datasets show that the soft prompt consistently outperforms other methods in terms of F1 scores across all datasets. Additionally, this study also investigates the capability of prompt learning in few-shot learning and observes that the hard prompt achieves the highest F1 scores in both zero-shot and one-shot context. These findings underscore the effectiveness of prompt learning paradigms in tackling challenging EM tasks.