NuNER: Entity Recognition Encoder Pre-training via LLM-Annotated Data

Sergei Bogdanov, Alexandre Constantin, Timothée Bernard, Benoit Crabbé, Etienne Bernard


Abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive abilities in data annotation, opening the way for new approaches to solve classic NLP problems. In this paper, we show how to use LLMs to create NuNER, a compact language representation model specialized in the Named Entity Recognition (NER) task. NuNER can be fine-tuned to solve downstream NER problems in a data-efficient way, outperforming similar-sized foundation models in the few-shot regime and competing with much larger LLMs. We find that the size and entity-type diversity of the pre-training dataset are key to achieving good performance. We view NuNER as a member of the broader family of task-specific foundation models, recently unlocked by LLMs. NuNER and NuNER’s dataset are open-sourced with MIT License.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.660
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:
11829–11841
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.660
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sergei Bogdanov, Alexandre Constantin, Timothée Bernard, Benoit Crabbé, and Etienne Bernard. 2024. NuNER: Entity Recognition Encoder Pre-training via LLM-Annotated Data. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 11829–11841, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
NuNER: Entity Recognition Encoder Pre-training via LLM-Annotated Data (Bogdanov et al., EMNLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.660.pdf