An Enhanced Span-based Decomposition Method for Few-Shot Sequence Labeling

Peiyi Wang, Runxin Xu, Tianyu Liu, Qingyu Zhou, Yunbo Cao, Baobao Chang, Zhifang Sui


Abstract
Few-Shot Sequence Labeling (FSSL) is a canonical paradigm for the tagging models, e.g., named entity recognition and slot filling, to generalize on an emerging, resource-scarce domain. Recently, the metric-based meta-learning framework has been recognized as a promising approach for FSSL. However, most prior works assign a label to each token based on the token-level similarities, which ignores the integrality of named entities or slots. To this end, in this paper, we propose ESD, an Enhanced Span-based Decomposition method for FSSL. ESD formulates FSSL as a span-level matching problem between test query and supporting instances. Specifically, ESD decomposes the span matching problem into a series of span-level procedures, mainly including enhanced span representation, class prototype aggregation and span conflicts resolution. Extensive experiments show that ESD achieves the new state-of-the-art results on two popular FSSL benchmarks, FewNERD and SNIPS, and is proven to be more robust in the noisy and nested tagging scenarios.
Anthology ID:
2022.naacl-main.369
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
Month:
July
Year:
2022
Address:
Seattle, United States
Editors:
Marine Carpuat, Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Ivan Vladimir Meza Ruiz
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5012–5024
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.naacl-main.369
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.naacl-main.369
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Peiyi Wang, Runxin Xu, Tianyu Liu, Qingyu Zhou, Yunbo Cao, Baobao Chang, and Zhifang Sui. 2022. An Enhanced Span-based Decomposition Method for Few-Shot Sequence Labeling. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 5012–5024, Seattle, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
An Enhanced Span-based Decomposition Method for Few-Shot Sequence Labeling (Wang et al., NAACL 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.naacl-main.369.pdf
Software:
 2022.naacl-main.369.software.zip
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.naacl-main.369.mp4
Code
 wangpeiyi9979/esd
Data
Few-NERDSNIPS