Chen Guo
2025
GPT-NER: Named Entity Recognition via Large Language Models
Shuhe Wang
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Xiaofei Sun
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Xiaoya Li
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Rongbin Ouyang
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Fei Wu
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Tianwei Zhang
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Jiwei Li
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Guoyin Wang
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Chen Guo
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025
Despite the fact that large-scale Language Models (LLM) have achieved SOTA performances on a variety of NLP tasks, its performance on NER is still significantly below supervised baselines. This is due to the gap between the two tasks the NER and LLMs: the former is a sequence labeling task in nature while the latter is a text-generation model.In this paper, we propose GPT-NER to resolve this issue. GPT-NER bridges the gap by transforming the sequence labeling task to a generation task that can be easily adapted by LLMs e.g., the task of finding location entities in the input text “Columbus is a city” is transformed to generate the text sequence "@@Columbus## is a city”, where special tokens @@## marks the entity to extract. To efficiently address the hallucination issue of LLMs, where LLMs have a strong inclination to over-confidently label NULL inputs as entities, we propose a self-verification strategy by prompting LLMs to ask itself whether the extracted entities belong to a labeled entity tag.We conduct experiments on five widely adopted NER datasets, and GPT-NER achieves comparable performances to fully supervised baselines, which is the first time as far as we are concerned. More importantly, we find that GPT-NER exhibits a greater ability in the low-resource and few-shot setups, when the amount of training data is extremely scarce, GPT-NER performs significantly better than supervised models. This demonstrates the capabilities of GPT-NER in real-world NER applications where the number of labeled examples is limited.
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Co-authors
- Xiaoya Li 1
- Jiwei Li 1
- Rongbin Ouyang 1
- Xiaofei Sun 1
- Shuhe Wang 1
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