Sampling Better Negatives for Distantly Supervised Named Entity Recognition

Lu Xu, Lidong Bing, Wei Lu


Abstract
Distantly supervised named entity recognition (DS-NER) has been proposed to exploit the automatically labeled training data instead of human annotations. The distantly annotated datasets are often noisy and contain a considerable number of false negatives. The recent approach uses a weighted sampling approach to select a subset of negative samples for training. However, it requires a good classifier to assign weights to the negative samples. In this paper, we propose a simple and straightforward approach for selecting the top negative samples that have high similarities with all the positive samples for training. Our method achieves consistent performance improvements on four distantly supervised NER datasets. Our analysis also shows that it is critical to differentiate the true negatives from the false negatives.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-acl.300
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:
4874–4882
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.300
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.300
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Lu Xu, Lidong Bing, and Wei Lu. 2023. Sampling Better Negatives for Distantly Supervised Named Entity Recognition. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023, pages 4874–4882, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Sampling Better Negatives for Distantly Supervised Named Entity Recognition (Xu et al., Findings 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.300.pdf