Task-adaptive Label Dependency Transfer for Few-shot Named Entity Recognition

Shan Zhang, Bin Cao, Tianming Zhang, Yuqi Liu, Jing Fan


Abstract
Named Entity Recognition (NER), as a crucial subtask in natural language processing (NLP), suffers from limited labeled samples (a.k.a. few-shot). Meta-learning methods are widely used for few-shot NER, but these existing methods overlook the importance of label dependency for NER, resulting in suboptimal performance. However, applying meta-learning methods to label dependency learning faces a special challenge, that is, due to the discrepancy of label sets in different domains, the label dependencies can not be transferred across domains. In this paper, we propose the Task-adaptive Label Dependency Transfer (TLDT) method to make label dependency transferable and effectively adapt to new tasks by a few samples. TLDT improves the existing optimization-based meta-learning methods by learning general initialization and individual parameter update rule for label dependency. Extensive experiments show that TLDT achieves significant improvement over the state-of-the-art methods.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-acl.203
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3280–3293
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.203
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.203
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shan Zhang, Bin Cao, Tianming Zhang, Yuqi Liu, and Jing Fan. 2023. Task-adaptive Label Dependency Transfer for Few-shot Named Entity Recognition. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023, pages 3280–3293, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Task-adaptive Label Dependency Transfer for Few-shot Named Entity Recognition (Zhang et al., Findings 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.203.pdf