Abstract: Conflict of interest (COI) disclosure statements provide rich information to support transparency and reduce bias in research. We introduce a novel task to identify relationships between sponsoring entities and the research studies they sponsor from the disclosure statement. This task is challenging due to the complexity of recognizing all potential relationship patterns and the hierarchical nature of identifying entities first and then extracting their relationships to the study. To overcome these challenges, in this paper, we also constructed a new annotated dataset and proposed a Question Answering-based method to recognize entities and extract relationships. Our method has demonstrated robustness in handling diverse relationship patterns, and it remains effective even when trained on a low-resource dataset.