Zero-shot Cross-lingual NER via Mitigating Language Difference: An Entity-aligned Translation Perspective

Zhihao Zhang, Sophia Yat Mei Lee, Dong Zhang, Shoushan Li, Guodong Zhou


Abstract
Cross-lingual Named Entity Recognition (CL-NER) aims to transfer knowledge from high-resource languages to low-resource languages. However, existing zero-shot CL-NER (ZCL-NER) approaches primarily focus on Latin script language (LSL), where shared linguistic features facilitate effective knowledge transfer. In contrast, for non-Latin script language (NSL), such as Chinese and Japanese, performance often degrades due to deep structural differences. To address these challenges, we propose an entity-aligned translation (EAT) approach. Leveraging large language models (LLMs), EAT employs a dual-translation strategy to align entities between NSL and English. In addition, we fine-tune LLMs using multilingual Wikipedia data to enhance the entity alignment from source to target languages.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-emnlp.244
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4541–4557
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/author-page-yu-wang-polytechnic/2025.findings-emnlp.244/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2025.findings-emnlp.244
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhihao Zhang, Sophia Yat Mei Lee, Dong Zhang, Shoushan Li, and Guodong Zhou. 2025. Zero-shot Cross-lingual NER via Mitigating Language Difference: An Entity-aligned Translation Perspective. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025, pages 4541–4557, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Zero-shot Cross-lingual NER via Mitigating Language Difference: An Entity-aligned Translation Perspective (Zhang et al., Findings 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/author-page-yu-wang-polytechnic/2025.findings-emnlp.244.pdf
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