SLIMER-IT: Zero-Shot NER on Italian Language

Andrew Zamai, Leonardo Rigutini, Marco Maggini, Andrea Zugarini


Abstract
Traditional approaches to Named Entity Recognition (NER) frame the task into a BIO sequence labeling problem. Although these systems often excel in the downstream task at hand, they require extensive annotated data and struggle to generalize to out-of-distribution input domains and unseen entity types. On the contrary, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong zero-shot capabilities. While several works address Zero-Shot NER in English, little has been done in other languages. In this paper, we define an evaluation framework for Zero-Shot NER, applying it to the Italian language. Furthermore, we introduce SLIMER-IT, the Italian version of SLIMER, an instruction-tuning approach for zero-shot NER leveraging prompts enriched with definition and guidelines. Comparisons with other state-of-the-art models, demonstrate the superiority of SLIMER-IT on never-seen-before entity tags.
Anthology ID:
2024.clicit-1.109
Volume:
Proceedings of the 10th Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (CLiC-it 2024)
Month:
December
Year:
2024
Address:
Pisa, Italy
Editors:
Felice Dell'Orletta, Alessandro Lenci, Simonetta Montemagni, Rachele Sprugnoli
Venue:
CLiC-it
SIG:
Publisher:
CEUR Workshop Proceedings
Note:
Pages:
1005–1012
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.clicit-1.109/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Andrew Zamai, Leonardo Rigutini, Marco Maggini, and Andrea Zugarini. 2024. SLIMER-IT: Zero-Shot NER on Italian Language. In Proceedings of the 10th Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (CLiC-it 2024), pages 1005–1012, Pisa, Italy. CEUR Workshop Proceedings.
Cite (Informal):
SLIMER-IT: Zero-Shot NER on Italian Language (Zamai et al., CLiC-it 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.clicit-1.109.pdf