COPNER: Contrastive Learning with Prompt Guiding for Few-shot Named Entity Recognition

Yucheng Huang, Kai He, Yige Wang, Xianli Zhang, Tieliang Gong, Rui Mao, Chen Li


Abstract
Distance metric learning has become a popular solution for few-shot Named Entity Recognition (NER). The typical setup aims to learn a similarity metric for measuring the semantic similarity between test samples and referents, where each referent represents an entity class. The effect of this setup may, however, be compromised for two reasons. First, there is typically a limited optimization exerted on the representations of entity tokens after initing by pre-trained language models. Second, the referents may be far from representing corresponding entity classes due to the label scarcity in the few-shot setting. To address these challenges, we propose a novel approach named COntrastive learning with Prompt guiding for few-shot NER (COPNER). We introduce a novel prompt composed of class-specific words to COPNER to serve as 1) supervision signals for conducting contrastive learning to optimize token representations; 2) metric referents for distance-metric inference on test samples. Experimental results demonstrate that COPNER outperforms state-of-the-art models with a significant margin in most cases. Moreover, COPNER shows great potential in the zero-shot setting.
Anthology ID:
2022.coling-1.222
Volume:
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
October
Year:
2022
Address:
Gyeongju, Republic of Korea
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Chu-Ren Huang, Hansaem Kim, James Pustejovsky, Leo Wanner, Key-Sun Choi, Pum-Mo Ryu, Hsin-Hsi Chen, Lucia Donatelli, Heng Ji, Sadao Kurohashi, Patrizia Paggio, Nianwen Xue, Seokhwan Kim, Younggyun Hahm, Zhong He, Tony Kyungil Lee, Enrico Santus, Francis Bond, Seung-Hoon Na
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
International Committee on Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2515–2527
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.coling-1.222
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yucheng Huang, Kai He, Yige Wang, Xianli Zhang, Tieliang Gong, Rui Mao, and Chen Li. 2022. COPNER: Contrastive Learning with Prompt Guiding for Few-shot Named Entity Recognition. In Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 2515–2527, Gyeongju, Republic of Korea. International Committee on Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
COPNER: Contrastive Learning with Prompt Guiding for Few-shot Named Entity Recognition (Huang et al., COLING 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.coling-1.222.pdf
Code
 andrewhyc/copner
Data
Few-NERDWNUT 2017