EconBERTa: Towards Robust Extraction of Named Entities in Economics

Karim Lasri, Pedro Vitor Quinta de Castro, Mona Schirmer, Luis Eduardo San Martin, Linxi Wang, Tomáš Dulka, Haaya Naushan, John Pougué-Biyong, Arianna Legovini, Samuel Fraiberger


Abstract
Adapting general-purpose language models has proven to be effective in tackling downstream tasks within specific domains. In this paper, we address the task of extracting entities from the economics literature on impact evaluation. To this end, we release EconBERTa, a large language model pretrained on scientific publications in economics, and ECON-IE, a new expert-annotated dataset of economics abstracts for Named Entity Recognition (NER). We find that EconBERTa reaches state-of-the-art performance on our downstream NER task. Additionally, we extensively analyze the model’s generalization capacities, finding that most errors correspond to detecting only a subspan of an entity or failure to extrapolate to longer sequences. This limitation is primarily due to an inability to detect part-of-speech sequences unseen during training, and this effect diminishes when the number of unique instances in the training set increases. Examining the generalization abilities of domain-specific language models paves the way towards improving the robustness of NER models for causal knowledge extraction.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.774
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:
11557–11577
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.774
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.774
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Karim Lasri, Pedro Vitor Quinta de Castro, Mona Schirmer, Luis Eduardo San Martin, Linxi Wang, Tomáš Dulka, Haaya Naushan, John Pougué-Biyong, Arianna Legovini, and Samuel Fraiberger. 2023. EconBERTa: Towards Robust Extraction of Named Entities in Economics. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 11557–11577, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
EconBERTa: Towards Robust Extraction of Named Entities in Economics (Lasri et al., Findings 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.774.pdf