SANTA: Separate Strategies for Inaccurate and Incomplete Annotation Noise in Distantly-Supervised Named Entity Recognition

Shuzheng Si, Zefan Cai, Shuang Zeng, Guoqiang Feng, Jiaxing Lin, Baobao Chang


Abstract
Distantly-Supervised Named Entity Recognition effectively alleviates the burden of time-consuming and expensive annotation in the supervised setting. But the context-free matching process and the limited coverage of knowledge bases introduce inaccurate and incomplete annotation noise respectively. Previous studies either considered only incomplete one or indiscriminately handle two types of noise with the same strategy. In this paper, we argue that the different causes of two types of noise bring up the requirement of different strategies in model architecture. Therefore, we propose the SANTA to handle these two types of noise separately with (1) Memory-smoothed Focal Loss and Entity-aware KNN to relieve the entity ambiguity problem caused by inaccurate annotation, and (2) Boundary Mixup to alleviate decision boundary shifting problem caused by incomplete annotation and a noise-tolerant loss to improve the model’s robustness. Benefiting from our separate tailored strategies, we confirm in the experiment that the two types of noise are well mitigated.SANTA also achieves a new state-of-the-art on five public datasets.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-acl.239
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:
3883–3896
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.239
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.239
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shuzheng Si, Zefan Cai, Shuang Zeng, Guoqiang Feng, Jiaxing Lin, and Baobao Chang. 2023. SANTA: Separate Strategies for Inaccurate and Incomplete Annotation Noise in Distantly-Supervised Named Entity Recognition. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023, pages 3883–3896, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
SANTA: Separate Strategies for Inaccurate and Incomplete Annotation Noise in Distantly-Supervised Named Entity Recognition (Si et al., Findings 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.239.pdf