The Role of Global and Local Context in Named Entity Recognition

Arthur Amalvy, Vincent Labatut, Richard Dufour


Abstract
Pre-trained transformer-based models have recently shown great performance when applied to Named Entity Recognition (NER). As the complexity of their self-attention mechanism prevents them from processing long documents at once, these models are usually applied in a sequential fashion. Such an approach unfortunately only incorporates local context and prevents leveraging global document context in long documents such as novels, which might hinder performance. In this article, we explore the impact of global document context, and its relationships with local context. We find that correctly retrieving global document context has a greater impact on performance than only leveraging local context, prompting for further research on how to better retrieve that context.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-short.62
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
714–722
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-short.62
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-short.62
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Arthur Amalvy, Vincent Labatut, and Richard Dufour. 2023. The Role of Global and Local Context in Named Entity Recognition. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers), pages 714–722, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
The Role of Global and Local Context in Named Entity Recognition (Amalvy et al., ACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-short.62.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-short.62.mp4