Learning to Rank Context for Named Entity Recognition Using a Synthetic Dataset

Arthur Amalvy, Vincent Labatut, Richard Dufour


Abstract
While recent pre-trained transformer-based models can perform named entity recognition (NER) with great accuracy, their limited range remains an issue when applied to long documents such as whole novels. To alleviate this issue, a solution is to retrieve relevant context at the document level. Unfortunately, the lack of supervision for such a task means one has to settle for unsupervised approaches. Instead, we propose to generate a synthetic context retrieval training dataset using Alpaca, an instruction-tuned large language model (LLM). Using this dataset, we train a neural context retriever based on a BERT model that is able to find relevant context for NER. We show that our method outperforms several retrieval baselines for the NER task on an English literary dataset composed of the first chapter of 40 books.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.642
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
10372–10382
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.642
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.642
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Arthur Amalvy, Vincent Labatut, and Richard Dufour. 2023. Learning to Rank Context for Named Entity Recognition Using a Synthetic Dataset. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 10372–10382, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Learning to Rank Context for Named Entity Recognition Using a Synthetic Dataset (Amalvy et al., EMNLP 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.642.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.642.mp4