LLMs as Bridges: Reformulating Grounded Multimodal Named Entity Recognition
Jinyuan Li, Han Li, Di Sun, Jiahao Wang, Wenkun Zhang, Zan Wang, Gang Pan
Abstract
Grounded Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (GMNER) is a nascent multimodal task that aims to identify named entities, entity types and their corresponding visual regions. GMNER task exhibits two challenging properties: 1) The weak correlation between image-text pairs in social media results in a significant portion of named entities being ungroundable. 2) There exists a distinction between coarse-grained referring expressions commonly used in similar tasks (e.g., phrase localization, referring expression comprehension) and fine-grained named entities. In this paper, we propose RiVEG, a unified framework that reformulates GMNER into a joint MNER-VE-VG task by leveraging large language models (LLMs) as a connecting bridge. This reformulation brings two benefits: 1) It maintains the optimal MNER performance and eliminates the need for employing object detection methods to pre-extract regional features, thereby naturally addressing two major limitations of existing GMNER methods. 2) The introduction of entity expansion expression and Visual Entailment (VE) module unifies Visual Grounding (VG) and Entity Grounding (EG). It enables RiVEG to effortlessly inherit the Visual Entailment and Visual Grounding capabilities of any current or prospective multimodal pretraining models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RiVEG outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the existing GMNER dataset and achieves absolute leads of 10.65%, 6.21%, and 8.83% in all three subtasks.- Anthology ID:
- 2024.findings-acl.76
- Volume:
- Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
- Month:
- August
- Year:
- 2024
- Address:
- Bangkok, Thailand
- Editors:
- Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
- Venue:
- Findings
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 1302–1318
- Language:
- URL:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/build-pipeline-with-new-library/2024.findings-acl.76/
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2024.findings-acl.76
- Cite (ACL):
- Jinyuan Li, Han Li, Di Sun, Jiahao Wang, Wenkun Zhang, Zan Wang, and Gang Pan. 2024. LLMs as Bridges: Reformulating Grounded Multimodal Named Entity Recognition. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024, pages 1302–1318, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- LLMs as Bridges: Reformulating Grounded Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (Li et al., Findings 2024)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/build-pipeline-with-new-library/2024.findings-acl.76.pdf