Abstract In this paper, we present GraphRel, an end-to-end relation extraction model which uses graph convolutional networks (GCNs) to jointly learn named entities and relations. In contrast to previous baselines, we consider the interaction between named entities and relations via a relation-weighted GCN to better extract relations. Linear and dependency structures are both used to extract both sequential and regional features of the text, and a complete word graph is further utilized to extract implicit features among all word pairs of the text. With the graph-based approach, the prediction for overlapping relations is substantially improved over previous sequential approaches. We evaluate GraphRel on two public datasets: NYT and WebNLG. Results show that GraphRel maintains high precision while increasing recall substantially. Also, GraphRel outperforms previous work by 3.2% and 5.8% (F1 score), achieving a new state-of-the-art for relation extraction.