@inproceedings{arora-park-2023-split,
    title = "Split-{NER}: Named Entity Recognition via Two Question-Answering-based Classifications",
    author = "Arora, Jatin  and
      Park, Youngja",
    editor = "Rogers, Anna  and
      Boyd-Graber, Jordan  and
      Okazaki, Naoaki",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2023",
    address = "Toronto, Canada",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/add-emnlp-2024-awards/2023.acl-short.36/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2023.acl-short.36",
    pages = "416--426",
    abstract = "In this work, we address the NER problem by splitting it into two logical sub-tasks: (1) Span Detection which simply extracts entity mention spans irrespective of entity type; (2) Span Classification which classifies the spans into their entity types. Further, we formulate both sub-tasks as question-answering (QA) problems and produce two leaner models which can be optimized separately for each sub-task. Experiments with four cross-domain datasets demonstrate that this two-step approach is both effective and time efficient. Our system, SplitNER outperforms baselines on OntoNotes5.0, WNUT17 and a cybersecurity dataset and gives on-par performance on BioNLP13CG. In all cases, it achieves a significant reduction in training time compared to its QA baseline counterpart. The effectiveness of our system stems from fine-tuning the BERT model twice, separately for span detection and classification. The source code can be found at \url{https://github.com/c3sr/split-ner}."
}