Named Entity Recognition with Small Strongly Labeled and Large Weakly Labeled Data

Haoming Jiang, Danqing Zhang, Tianyu Cao, Bing Yin, Tuo Zhao


Abstract
Weak supervision has shown promising results in many natural language processing tasks, such as Named Entity Recognition (NER). Existing work mainly focuses on learning deep NER models only with weak supervision, i.e., without any human annotation, and shows that by merely using weakly labeled data, one can achieve good performance, though still underperforms fully supervised NER with manually/strongly labeled data. In this paper, we consider a more practical scenario, where we have both a small amount of strongly labeled data and a large amount of weakly labeled data. Unfortunately, we observe that weakly labeled data does not necessarily improve, or even deteriorate the model performance (due to the extensive noise in the weak labels) when we train deep NER models over a simple or weighted combination of the strongly labeled and weakly labeled data. To address this issue, we propose a new multi-stage computational framework – NEEDLE with three essential ingredients: (1) weak label completion, (2) noise-aware loss function, and (3) final fine-tuning over the strongly labeled data. Through experiments on E-commerce query NER and Biomedical NER, we demonstrate that NEEDLE can effectively suppress the noise of the weak labels and outperforms existing methods. In particular, we achieve new SOTA F1-scores on 3 Biomedical NER datasets: BC5CDR-chem 93.74, BC5CDR-disease 90.69, NCBI-disease 92.28.
Anthology ID:
2021.acl-long.140
Volume:
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Chengqing Zong, Fei Xia, Wenjie Li, Roberto Navigli
Venues:
ACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1775–1789
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.140
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.140
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Haoming Jiang, Danqing Zhang, Tianyu Cao, Bing Yin, and Tuo Zhao. 2021. Named Entity Recognition with Small Strongly Labeled and Large Weakly Labeled Data. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 1775–1789, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Named Entity Recognition with Small Strongly Labeled and Large Weakly Labeled Data (Jiang et al., ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.140.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.140.mp4
Code
 amzn/amazon-weak-ner-needle
Data
NCBI Disease