A Study of Errors in the Output of Large Language Models for Domain-Specific Few-Shot Named Entity Recognition

Elena Volkanovska


Abstract
This paper proposes an error classification framework for a comprehensive analysis of the output that large language models (LLMs) generate in a few-shot named entity recognition (NER) task in a specialised domain. The framework should be seen as an exploratory analysis complementary to established performance metrics for NER classifiers, such as F1 score, as it accounts for outcomes possible in a few-shot, LLM-based NER task. By categorising and assessing incorrect named entity predictions quantitatively, the paper shows how the proposed error classification could support a deeper cross-model and cross-prompt performance comparison, alongside a roadmap for a guided qualitative error analysis.
Anthology ID:
2025.jlcl-2.3
Volume:
Journal for Language Technology and Computational Linguistics, Vol. 38 No. 2: LLM Fails - Failed experiments with generative AI and what we can learn from them
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Editors:
Ngoc Duyen Tanja Tu, Annelen Brunner, Christian Lang
Venue:
JLCL
SIG:
Publisher:
German Society for Computational Linguistics and Language Technology
Note:
Pages:
31–42
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.jlcl-2.3/
DOI:
10.21248/jlcl.38.2025.281
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Elena Volkanovska. 2025. A Study of Errors in the Output of Large Language Models for Domain-Specific Few-Shot Named Entity Recognition. Journal for Language Technology and Computational Linguistics, 38(2):31–42.
Cite (Informal):
A Study of Errors in the Output of Large Language Models for Domain-Specific Few-Shot Named Entity Recognition (Volkanovska, JLCL 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.jlcl-2.3.pdf