Generalizing Few-Shot Named Entity Recognizers to Unseen Domains with Type-Related Features

Zihan Wang, Ziqi Zhao, Zhumin Chen, Pengjie Ren, Maarten de Rijke, Zhaochun Ren


Abstract
Few-shot named entity recognition (NER) has shown remarkable progress in identifying entities in low-resource domains. However, few-shot NER methods still struggle with out-of-domain (OOD) examples due to their reliance on manual labeling for the target domain. To address this limitation, recent studies enable generalization to an unseen target domain with only a few labeled examples using data augmentation techniques. Two important challenges remain: First, augmentation is limited to the training data, resulting in minimal overlap between the generated data and OOD examples. Second, knowledge transfer is implicit and insufficient, severely hindering model generalizability and the integration of knowledge from the source domain. In this paper, we propose a framework, prompt learning with type-related features (PLTR), to address these challenges. To identify useful knowledge in the source domain and enhance knowledge transfer, PLTR automatically extracts entity type-related features (TRFs) based on mutual information criteria. To bridge the gap between training and OOD data, PLTR generates a unique prompt for each unseen example by selecting relevant TRFs. We show that PLTR achieves significant performance improvements on in-domain and cross-domain datasets. The use of PLTR facilitates model adaptation and increases representation similarities between the source and unseen domains.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.147
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:
2228–2240
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.147
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.147
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zihan Wang, Ziqi Zhao, Zhumin Chen, Pengjie Ren, Maarten de Rijke, and Zhaochun Ren. 2023. Generalizing Few-Shot Named Entity Recognizers to Unseen Domains with Type-Related Features. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 2228–2240, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Generalizing Few-Shot Named Entity Recognizers to Unseen Domains with Type-Related Features (Wang et al., Findings 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.147.pdf