No Arabic abstract
Recent advances in Named Entity Recognition (NER) show that document-level contexts can significantly improve model performance. In many application scenarios, however, such contexts are not available. In this paper, we propose to find external contexts of a sentence by retrieving and selecting a set of semantically relevant texts through a search engine, with the original sentence as the query. We find empirically that the contextual representations computed on the retrieval-based input view, constructed through the concatenation of a sentence and its external contexts, can achieve significantly improved performance compared to the original input view based only on the sentence. Furthermore, we can improve the model performance of both input views by Cooperative Learning, a training method that encourages the two input views to produce similar contextual representations or output label distributions. Experiments show that our approach can achieve new state-of-the-art performance on 8 NER data sets across 5 domains.
Named entity recognition (NER) is usually developed and tested on text from well-written sources. However, in intelligent voice assistants, where NER is an important component, input to NER may be noisy because of user or speech recognition error. In applications, entity labels may change frequently, and non-textual properties like topicality or popularity may be needed to choose among alternatives. We describe a NER system intended to address these problems. We test and train this system on a proprietary user-derived dataset. We compare with a baseline text-only NER system; the baseline enhanced with external gazetteers; and the baseline enhanced with the search and indirect labelling techniques we describe below. The final configuration gives around 6% reduction in NER error rate. We also show that this technique improves related tasks, such as semantic parsing, with an improvement of up to 5% in error rate.
Named entity recognition (NER) is a well-studied task in natural language processing. However, the widely-used sequence labeling framework is difficult to detect entities with nested structures. In this work, we view nested NER as constituency parsing with partially-observed trees and model it with partially-observed TreeCRFs. Specifically, we view all labeled entity spans as observed nodes in a constituency tree, and other spans as latent nodes. With the TreeCRF we achieve a uniform way to jointly model the observed and the latent nodes. To compute the probability of partial trees with partial marginalization, we propose a variant of the Inside algorithm, the textsc{Masked Inside} algorithm, that supports different inference operations for different nodes (evaluation for the observed, marginalization for the latent, and rejection for nodes incompatible with the observed) with efficient parallelized implementation, thus significantly speeding up training and inference. Experiments show that our approach achieves the state-of-the-art (SOTA) F1 scores on the ACE2004, ACE2005 dataset, and shows comparable performance to SOTA models on the GENIA dataset. Our approach is implemented at: url{https://github.com/FranxYao/Partially-Observed-TreeCRFs}.
Recently, considerable literature has grown up around the theme of few-shot named entity recognition (NER), but little published benchmark data specifically focused on the practical and challenging task. Current approaches collect existing supervised NER datasets and re-organize them to the few-shot setting for empirical study. These strategies conventionally aim to recognize coarse-grained entity types with few examples, while in practice, most unseen entity types are fine-grained. In this paper, we present Few-NERD, a large-scale human-annotated few-shot NER dataset with a hierarchy of 8 coarse-grained and 66 fine-grained entity types. Few-NERD consists of 188,238 sentences from Wikipedia, 4,601,160 words are included and each is annotated as context or a part of a two-level entity type. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first few-shot NER dataset and the largest human-crafted NER dataset. We construct benchmark tasks with different emphases to comprehensively assess the generalization capability of models. Extensive empirical results and analysis show that Few-NERD is challenging and the problem requires further research. We make Few-NERD public at https://ningding97.github.io/fewnerd/.
Weak supervision has shown promising results in many natural language processing tasks, such as Named Entity Recognition (NER). Existing work mainly focuses on learning deep NER models only with weak supervision, i.e., without any human annotation, and shows that by merely using weakly labeled data, one can achieve good performance, though still underperforms fully supervised NER with manually/strongly labeled data. In this paper, we consider a more practical scenario, where we have both a small amount of strongly labeled data and a large amount of weakly labeled data. Unfortunately, we observe that weakly labeled data does not necessarily improve, or even deteriorate the model performance (due to the extensive noise in the weak labels) when we train deep NER models over a simple or weighted combination of the strongly labeled and weakly labeled data. To address this issue, we propose a new multi-stage computational framework -- NEEDLE with three essential ingredients: (1) weak label completion, (2) noise-aware loss function, and (3) final fine-tuning over the strongly labeled data. Through experiments on E-commerce query NER and Biomedical NER, we demonstrate that NEEDLE can effectively suppress the noise of the weak labels and outperforms existing methods. In particular, we achieve new SOTA F1-scores on 3 Biomedical NER datasets: BC5CDR-chem 93.74, BC5CDR-disease 90.69, NCBI-disease 92.28.
Deep learning has yielded state-of-the-art performance on many natural language processing tasks including named entity recognition (NER). However, this typically requires large amounts of labeled data. In this work, we demonstrate that the amount of labeled training data can be drastically reduced when deep learning is combined with active learning. While active learning is sample-efficient, it can be computationally expensive since it requires iterative retraining. To speed this up, we introduce a lightweight architecture for NER, viz., the CNN-CNN-LSTM model consisting of convolutional character and word encoders and a long short term memory (LSTM) tag decoder. The model achieves nearly state-of-the-art performance on standard datasets for the task while being computationally much more efficient than best performing models. We carry out incremental active learning, during the training process, and are able to nearly match state-of-the-art performance with just 25% of the original training data.