NoiseBench: Benchmarking the Impact of Real Label Noise on Named Entity Recognition

Elena Merdjanovska, Ansar Aynetdinov, Alan Akbik


Abstract
Available training data for named entity recognition (NER) often contains a significant percentage of incorrect labels for entity types and entity boundaries. Such label noise poses challenges for supervised learning and may significantly deteriorate model quality. To address this, prior work proposed various noise-robust learning approaches capable of learning from data with partially incorrect labels. These approaches are typically evaluated using simulated noise where the labels in a clean dataset are automatically corrupted. However, as we show in this paper, this leads to unrealistic noise that is far easier to handle than real noise caused by human error or semi-automatic annotation. To enable the study of the impact of various types of real noise, we introduce NoiseBench, an NER benchmark consisting of clean training data corrupted with 6 types of real noise, including expert errors, crowdsourcing errors, automatic annotation errors and LLM errors. We present an analysis that shows that real noise is significantly more challenging than simulated noise, and show that current state-of-the-art models for noise-robust learning fall far short of their achievable upper bound. We release NoiseBench for both English and German to the research community.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.1011
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
18182–18198
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.1011/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-main.1011
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Elena Merdjanovska, Ansar Aynetdinov, and Alan Akbik. 2024. NoiseBench: Benchmarking the Impact of Real Label Noise on Named Entity Recognition. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 18182–18198, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
NoiseBench: Benchmarking the Impact of Real Label Noise on Named Entity Recognition (Merdjanovska et al., EMNLP 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.1011.pdf
Software:
 2024.emnlp-main.1011.software.zip