Few-shot Learning for Sumerian Named Entity Recognition

Guanghai Wang, Yudong Liu, James Hearne


Abstract
This paper presents our study in exploring the task of named entity recognition (NER) in a low resource setting, focusing on few-shot learning on the Sumerian NER task. The Sumerian language is deemed as an extremely low-resource language due to that (1) it is a long dead language, (2) highly skilled language experts are extremely scarce. NER on Sumerian text is important in that it helps identify the actors and entities active in a given period of time from the collections of tens of thousands of texts in building socio-economic networks of the archives of interest. As a text classification task, NER tends to become challenging when the amount of annotated data is limited or the model is required to handle new classes. The Sumerian NER is no exception. In this work, we propose to use two few-shot learning systems, ProtoBERT and NNShot, to the Sumerian NER task. Our experiments show that the ProtoBERT NER generally outperforms both the NNShot NER and the fully supervised BERT NER in low resource settings on the predictions of rare classes. In particular, F1-score of ProtoBERT on unseen entity types on our test set has achieved 89.6% that is significantly better than the F1-score of 84.3% of the BERT NER.
Anthology ID:
2022.deeplo-1.15
Volume:
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Deep Learning for Low-Resource Natural Language Processing
Month:
July
Year:
2022
Address:
Hybrid
Editors:
Colin Cherry, Angela Fan, George Foster, Gholamreza (Reza) Haffari, Shahram Khadivi, Nanyun (Violet) Peng, Xiang Ren, Ehsan Shareghi, Swabha Swayamdipta
Venue:
DeepLo
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
136–145
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.deeplo-1.15
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.deeplo-1.15
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Guanghai Wang, Yudong Liu, and James Hearne. 2022. Few-shot Learning for Sumerian Named Entity Recognition. In Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Deep Learning for Low-Resource Natural Language Processing, pages 136–145, Hybrid. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Few-shot Learning for Sumerian Named Entity Recognition (Wang et al., DeepLo 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.deeplo-1.15.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.deeplo-1.15.mp4