Large-Scale Label Interpretation Learning for Few-Shot Named Entity Recognition

Jonas Golde, Felix Hamborg, Alan Akbik


Abstract
Few-shot named entity recognition (NER) detects named entities within text using only a few annotated examples. One promising line of research is to leverage natural language descriptions of each entity type: the common label PER might, for example, be verbalized as ”person entity.” In an initial label interpretation learning phase, the model learns to interpret such verbalized descriptions of entity types. In a subsequent few-shot tagset extension phase, this model is then given a description of a previously unseen entity type (such as ”music album”) and optionally a few training examples to perform few-shot NER for this type. In this paper, we systematically explore the impact of a strong semantic prior to interpret verbalizations of new entity types by massively scaling up the number and granularity of entity types used for label interpretation learning. To this end, we leverage an entity linking benchmark to create a dataset with orders of magnitude of more distinct entity types and descriptions as currently used datasets. We find that this increased signal yields strong results in zero- and few-shot NER in in-domain, cross-domain, and even cross-lingual settings. Our findings indicate significant potential for improving few-shot NER through heuristical data-based optimization.
Anthology ID:
2024.eacl-long.178
Volume:
Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
March
Year:
2024
Address:
St. Julian’s, Malta
Editors:
Yvette Graham, Matthew Purver
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2915–2930
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.eacl-long.178
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jonas Golde, Felix Hamborg, and Alan Akbik. 2024. Large-Scale Label Interpretation Learning for Few-Shot Named Entity Recognition. In Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 2915–2930, St. Julian’s, Malta. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Large-Scale Label Interpretation Learning for Few-Shot Named Entity Recognition (Golde et al., EACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.eacl-long.178.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2024.eacl-long.178.mp4