Nikola Ivačič


2023

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Analysis of Transfer Learning for Named Entity Recognition in South-Slavic Languages
Nikola Ivačič | Thi Hong Hanh Tran | Boshko Koloski | Senja Pollak | Matthew Purver
Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on Slavic Natural Language Processing 2023 (SlavicNLP 2023)

This paper analyzes a Named Entity Recognition task for South-Slavic languages using the pre-trained multilingual neural network models. We investigate whether the performance of the models for a target language can be improved by using data from closely related languages. We have shown that the model performance is not influenced substantially when trained with other than a target language. While for Slovene, the monolingual setting generally performs better, for Croatian and Serbian the results are slightly better in selected cross-lingual settings, but the improvements are not large. The most significant performance improvement is shown for the Serbian language, which has the smallest corpora. Therefore, fine-tuning with other closely related languages may benefit only the “low resource” languages.