  Few-shot relation classification seeks to classify incoming query instances
after meeting only few support instances. This ability is gained by training
with large amount of in-domain annotated data. In this paper, we tackle an even
harder problem by further limiting the amount of data available at training
time. We propose a few-shot learning framework for relation classification,
which is particularly powerful when the training data is very small. In this
framework, models not only strive to classify query instances, but also seek
underlying knowledge about the support instances to obtain better instance
representations. The framework also includes a method for aggregating
cross-domain knowledge into models by open-source task enrichment.
Additionally, we construct a brand new dataset: the TinyRel-CM dataset, a
few-shot relation classification dataset in health domain with purposely small
training data and challenging relation classes. Experimental results
demonstrate that our framework brings performance gains for most underlying
classification models, outperforms the state-of-the-art results given small
training data, and achieves competitive results with sufficiently large
training data.
