Few-NERD: A Few-shot Named Entity Recognition Dataset

Ning Ding, Guangwei Xu, Yulin Chen, Xiaobin Wang, Xu Han, Pengjun Xie, Haitao Zheng, Zhiyuan Liu


Abstract
Recently, considerable literature has grown up around the theme of few-shot named entity recognition (NER), but little published benchmark data specifically focused on the practical and challenging task. Current approaches collect existing supervised NER datasets and re-organize them to the few-shot setting for empirical study. These strategies conventionally aim to recognize coarse-grained entity types with few examples, while in practice, most unseen entity types are fine-grained. In this paper, we present Few-NERD, a large-scale human-annotated few-shot NER dataset with a hierarchy of 8 coarse-grained and 66 fine-grained entity types. Few-NERD consists of 188,238 sentences from Wikipedia, 4,601,160 words are included and each is annotated as context or a part of the two-level entity type. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first few-shot NER dataset and the largest human-crafted NER dataset. We construct benchmark tasks with different emphases to comprehensively assess the generalization capability of models. Extensive empirical results and analysis show that Few-NERD is challenging and the problem requires further research. The Few-NERD dataset and the baselines will be publicly available to facilitate the research on this problem.
Anthology ID:
2021.acl-long.248
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:
3198–3213
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.248
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.248
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ning Ding, Guangwei Xu, Yulin Chen, Xiaobin Wang, Xu Han, Pengjun Xie, Haitao Zheng, and Zhiyuan Liu. 2021. Few-NERD: A Few-shot Named Entity Recognition Dataset. 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 3198–3213, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Few-NERD: A Few-shot Named Entity Recognition Dataset (Ding et al., ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.248.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.248.mp4
Code
 thunlp/Few-NERD +  additional community code
Data
Few-NERDWNUT 2017