Dynamically Acquiring Text Content to Enable the Classification of Lesser-known Entities for Real-world Tasks

Fahmida Alam, Ellen Riloff


Abstract
Existing Natural Language Processing (NLP) resources often lack the task-specific information required for real-world problems and provide limited coverage of lesser-known or newly introduced entities. For example, business organizations and health care providers may need to be classified into a variety of different taxonomic schemes for specific application tasks. Our goal is to enable domain experts to easily create a task-specific classifier for entities by providing only entity names and gold labels as training data. Our framework then dynamically acquires descriptive text about each entity, which is subsequently used as the basis for producing a text-based classifier. We propose a novel text acquisition method that leverages both web and large language models (LLMs). We evaluate our proposed framework on two classification problems in distinct domains: (i) classifying organizations into Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) Codes, which categorize organizations based on their business activities; and (ii) classifying healthcare providers into healthcare provider taxonomy codes, which represent a provider’s medical specialty and area of practice. Our best-performing model achieved macro-averaged F1-scores of 82.3% and 72.9% on the SIC code and healthcare taxonomy code classification tasks, respectively.
Anthology ID:
2026.lrec-1.847
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Stelios Piperidis, Núria Bel, Henk van den Heuvel, Nancy Ide, Simon Krek, Antonio Toral
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resource Association
Note:
Pages:
10815–10825
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-main-847
DOI:
10.63317/2sgctcg3bvf7
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Fahmida Alam and Ellen Riloff. 2026. Dynamically Acquiring Text Content to Enable the Classification of Lesser-known Entities for Real-world Tasks. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 10815–10825, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. ELRA Language Resource Association.
Cite (Informal):
Dynamically Acquiring Text Content to Enable the Classification of Lesser-known Entities for Real-world Tasks (Alam & Riloff, LREC 2026)
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