Addressing NER Annotation Noises with Uncertainty-Guided Tree-Structured CRFs

Jian Liu, Weichang Liu, Yufeng Chen, Jinan Xu, Zhe Zhao


Abstract
Real-world named entity recognition (NER) datasets are notorious for their noisy nature, attributed to annotation errors, inconsistencies, and subjective interpretations. Such noises present a substantial challenge for traditional supervised learning methods. In this paper, we present a new and unified approach to tackle annotation noises for NER. Our method considers NER as a constituency tree parsing problem, utilizing a tree-structured Conditional Random Fields (CRFs) with uncertainty evaluation for integration. Through extensive experiments conducted on four real-world datasets, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our model in addressing both partial and incorrect annotation errors. Remarkably, our model exhibits superb performance even in extreme scenarios with 90% annotation noise.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.872
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:
14112–14123
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.872
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.872
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jian Liu, Weichang Liu, Yufeng Chen, Jinan Xu, and Zhe Zhao. 2023. Addressing NER Annotation Noises with Uncertainty-Guided Tree-Structured CRFs. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 14112–14123, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Addressing NER Annotation Noises with Uncertainty-Guided Tree-Structured CRFs (Liu et al., EMNLP 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.872.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.872.mp4