  The extrapolation of nucleon axial charge $g_A$ is investigated within the
framework of heavy baryon chiral effective field theory. The intermediate octet
and decuplet baryons are included in the one loop calculation. Finite range
regularization is applied to improve the convergence in the quark-mass
expansion. The lattice data from three different groups are used for the
extrapolation. At physical pion mass, the extrapolated $g_A$ are all smaller
than the experimental value.
