Causal Intervention-based Few-Shot Named Entity Recognition

Zhen Yang, Yongbin Liu, Chunping Ouyang


Abstract
Few-shot named entity recognition (NER) systems aim to recognize new classes of entities with limited labeled samples. However, these systems face a significant challenge of overfitting compared to tasks with abundant samples. This overfitting is mainly caused by the spurious correlation resulting from the bias in selecting a few samples. To address this issue, we propose a causal intervention-based few-shot NER method in this paper. Our method, based on the prototypical network, intervenes in the context to block the backdoor path between context and label. In the one-shot scenario, where no additional context is available for intervention, we employ incremental learning to intervene on the prototype, which also helps mitigate catastrophic forgetting. Our experiments on various benchmarks demonstrate that our approach achieves new state-of-the-art results.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.1046
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
15635–15646
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.1046
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.1046
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhen Yang, Yongbin Liu, and Chunping Ouyang. 2023. Causal Intervention-based Few-Shot Named Entity Recognition. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 15635–15646, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Causal Intervention-based Few-Shot Named Entity Recognition (Yang et al., Findings 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.1046.pdf