MultiCoNER-II is a fine-grained Named Entity Recognition (NER) task that aims to identify ambiguous and complex named entities in multiple languages, with a small amount of contextual information available. To address this task, we propose a multi-stage information retrieval (IR) pipeline that improves the performance of language models for fine-grained NER. Our approach involves leveraging a combination of a BM25-based IR model and a language model to retrieve relevant passages from a corpus. These passages are then used to train a model that utilizes a weighted average of losses. The prediction is generated by a decoder stack that includes a projection layer and conditional random field. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, we participated in the English track of the MultiCoNER-II competition. Our approach yielded promising results, which we validated through detailed analysis.

Reading and comprehension are quintessentially cognitive tasks. Eye movement acts as a surrogate to understand which part of a sentence is critical to the process of comprehension. The aim of the shared task is to predict five eye-tracking features for a given word of the input sentence. We experimented with several models based on LGBM (Light Gradient Boosting Machine) Regression, ANN (Artificial Neural Network), and CNN (Convolutional Neural Network), using BERT embeddings and some combination of linguistic features. Our submission using CNN achieved an average MAE of 4.0639 and ranked 7th in the shared task. The average MAE was further lowered to 3.994 in post-task evaluation.