Do “English” Named Entity Recognizers Work Well on Global Englishes?
Alexander Shan, John Bauer, Riley Carlson, Christopher Manning
Abstract
The vast majority of the popular English named entity recognition (NER) datasets contain American or British English data, despite the existence of many global varieties of English. As such, it is unclear whether they generalize for analyzing use of English globally. To test this, we build a newswire dataset, the Worldwide English NER Dataset, to analyze NER model performance on low-resource English variants from around the world. We test widely used NER toolkits and transformer models, including models using the pre-trained contextual models RoBERTa and ELECTRA, on three datasets: a commonly used British English newswire dataset, CoNLL 2003, a more American focused dataset OntoNotes, and our global dataset. All models trained on the CoNLL or OntoNotes datasets experienced significant performance drops—over 10 F1 in some cases—when tested on the Worldwide English dataset. Upon examination of region-specific errors, we observe the greatest performance drops for Oceania and Africa, while Asia and the Middle East had comparatively strong performance. Lastly, we find that a combined model trained on the Worldwide dataset and either CoNLL or OntoNotes lost only 1-2 F1 on both test sets.- Anthology ID:
- 2023.findings-emnlp.788
- Volume:
- Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
- Month:
- December
- Year:
- 2023
- Address:
- Singapore
- Editors:
- Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
- Venue:
- Findings
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 11778–11791
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.788
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.788
- Cite (ACL):
- Alexander Shan, John Bauer, Riley Carlson, and Christopher Manning. 2023. Do “English” Named Entity Recognizers Work Well on Global Englishes?. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 11778–11791, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Do “English” Named Entity Recognizers Work Well on Global Englishes? (Shan et al., Findings 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-2023-videos/2023.findings-emnlp.788.pdf