Dabin Fu
2026
ReCoT-NER: Enhancing Zero-Shot Named Entity Recognition through Chain-of-Thought Prompting and Recall-Oriented Loss Optimization
Dabin Fu | Fanghong Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Dabin Fu | Fanghong Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Named Entity Recognition (NER) plays a fundamental role in information extraction and domain knowledge construction. However, in specialized domains such as wind power fault diagnosis, the scarcity of labeled data makes supervised approaches impractical. Zero-shot NER provides a promising alternative but still struggles with incomplete entity detection and unstable generation boundaries. To address these challenges, we propose ReCoT-NER, a reasoning-enhanced generative framework that integrates Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting and recall-oriented loss optimization. The proposed CoT instruction design explicitly decomposes NER into two reasoning stages: entity span detection and entity type classification. This enables the model to follow a structured inference process. In addition, we introduce a recall-oriented loss function that reweights entity and non-entity tokens to mitigate false negatives, encouraging more inclusive entity coverage. Experiments on CrossNER, MIT, and a newly constructed wind-power NER dataset demonstrate that ReCoT-NER consistently improves recall and overall F1 performance across both general and industrial domains. Notably, ReCoT-NER achieves competitive results with just a 77M-parameter model, making it well-suited for low-resource zero-shot settings. The code for our method is publicly available at https://github.com/10637409100/RECOTNER.