@inproceedings{weng-etal-2026-anchoralign,
title = "{A}nchor{A}lign: A Novel Anchor Alignment-enhanced Generative Method for Joint Named Entity Recognition and Relation Extraction",
author = "Weng, Xiaolong and
Zhou, Yuanyun and
Qiu, Boyu and
Wang, Zehua and
Xiong, Ying and
Tang, Buzhou",
editor = "Liakata, Maria and
Moreira, Viviane P. and
Zhang, Jiajun and
Jurgens, David",
booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {ACL} 2026",
month = jul,
year = "2026",
address = "San Diego, California, United States",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-acl.1898/",
pages = "38068--38081",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-395-1",
abstract = "Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Relation Extraction (RE) are two fundamental and interdependent tasks in information extraction (IE), aiming to identify entities and relations from unstructured text. Recently, generative methods have become mainstream instead of discriminative methods for IE, especially joint multi-task IE, due to their promising performance and flexibility. For joint NER and RE, existing methods suffer from misalignment between entities and relations, as well as misalignment among relations. To address these issues, we propose AnchorAlign, a novel generative method enhanced by anchor alignment. Specifically, we first introduce an anchor entity selection mechanism to identify key entities in the text as anchor points, which serve as semantic pivots to bridge the two tasks. Then, we design a dual-level anchor alignment module: at the semantic level, we construct a cross-task semantic alignment space to align the semantic representations of anchor entities and their associated relations; at the generation level, we introduce an anchor-guided generation constraint to guide the model to generate entities and relations with strict alignment based on the anchor points. Extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets show that AnchorAlign outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, demonstrating its effectiveness. Our work provides a new perspective for optimizing the joint modeling of NER and RE, and has potential to be extended to more complex multi-task IE such as NER and Event Extraction (EE)."
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<abstract>Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Relation Extraction (RE) are two fundamental and interdependent tasks in information extraction (IE), aiming to identify entities and relations from unstructured text. Recently, generative methods have become mainstream instead of discriminative methods for IE, especially joint multi-task IE, due to their promising performance and flexibility. For joint NER and RE, existing methods suffer from misalignment between entities and relations, as well as misalignment among relations. To address these issues, we propose AnchorAlign, a novel generative method enhanced by anchor alignment. Specifically, we first introduce an anchor entity selection mechanism to identify key entities in the text as anchor points, which serve as semantic pivots to bridge the two tasks. Then, we design a dual-level anchor alignment module: at the semantic level, we construct a cross-task semantic alignment space to align the semantic representations of anchor entities and their associated relations; at the generation level, we introduce an anchor-guided generation constraint to guide the model to generate entities and relations with strict alignment based on the anchor points. Extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets show that AnchorAlign outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, demonstrating its effectiveness. Our work provides a new perspective for optimizing the joint modeling of NER and RE, and has potential to be extended to more complex multi-task IE such as NER and Event Extraction (EE).</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T AnchorAlign: A Novel Anchor Alignment-enhanced Generative Method for Joint Named Entity Recognition and Relation Extraction
%A Weng, Xiaolong
%A Zhou, Yuanyun
%A Qiu, Boyu
%A Wang, Zehua
%A Xiong, Ying
%A Tang, Buzhou
%Y Liakata, Maria
%Y Moreira, Viviane P.
%Y Zhang, Jiajun
%Y Jurgens, David
%S Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
%D 2026
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C San Diego, California, United States
%@ 979-8-89176-395-1
%F weng-etal-2026-anchoralign
%X Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Relation Extraction (RE) are two fundamental and interdependent tasks in information extraction (IE), aiming to identify entities and relations from unstructured text. Recently, generative methods have become mainstream instead of discriminative methods for IE, especially joint multi-task IE, due to their promising performance and flexibility. For joint NER and RE, existing methods suffer from misalignment between entities and relations, as well as misalignment among relations. To address these issues, we propose AnchorAlign, a novel generative method enhanced by anchor alignment. Specifically, we first introduce an anchor entity selection mechanism to identify key entities in the text as anchor points, which serve as semantic pivots to bridge the two tasks. Then, we design a dual-level anchor alignment module: at the semantic level, we construct a cross-task semantic alignment space to align the semantic representations of anchor entities and their associated relations; at the generation level, we introduce an anchor-guided generation constraint to guide the model to generate entities and relations with strict alignment based on the anchor points. Extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets show that AnchorAlign outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, demonstrating its effectiveness. Our work provides a new perspective for optimizing the joint modeling of NER and RE, and has potential to be extended to more complex multi-task IE such as NER and Event Extraction (EE).
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-acl.1898/
%P 38068-38081
Markdown (Informal)
[AnchorAlign: A Novel Anchor Alignment-enhanced Generative Method for Joint Named Entity Recognition and Relation Extraction](https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-acl.1898/) (Weng et al., Findings 2026)
ACL