Ayoub Hammal


2025

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Few-shot domain adaptation for named-entity recognition via joint constrained k-means and subspace selection
Ayoub Hammal | Benno Uthayasooriyar | Caio Corro
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Named-entity recognition (NER) is a task that typically requires large annotated datasets, which limits its applicability across domains with varying entity definitions. This paper addresses few-shot NER, aiming to transfer knowledge to new domains with minimal supervision. Unlike previous approaches that rely solely on limited annotated data, we propose a weakly-supervised algorithm that combines small labeled datasets with large amounts of unlabeled data. Our method extends the k-means algorithm with label supervision, cluster size constraints, and domain-specific discriminative subspace selection. This unified framework achieves state-of-the-art results in few-shot NER, demonstrating its effectiveness in leveraging unlabeled data and adapting to domain-specific challenges.