  Relation classification is an important research arena in the field of
natural language processing (NLP). In this paper, we present SDP-LSTM, a novel
neural network to classify the relation of two entities in a sentence. Our
neural architecture leverages the shortest dependency path (SDP) between two
entities; multichannel recurrent neural networks, with long short term memory
(LSTM) units, pick up heterogeneous information along the SDP. Our proposed
model has several distinct features: (1) The shortest dependency paths retain
most relevant information (to relation classification), while eliminating
irrelevant words in the sentence. (2) The multichannel LSTM networks allow
effective information integration from heterogeneous sources over the
dependency paths. (3) A customized dropout strategy regularizes the neural
network to alleviate overfitting. We test our model on the SemEval 2010
relation classification task, and achieve an $F_1$-score of 83.7\%, higher than
competing methods in the literature.
