Does Synthetic Data Help Named Entity Recognition for Low-Resource Languages?

Gaurav Kamath, Sowmya Vajjala


Abstract
We explore whether synthetic datasets generated by large language models using a few high quality seed samples are useful for low-resource named entity recognition, considering 11 languages from three language families. Our results suggest that synthetic data created with such seed data is a reasonable choice when there is no available labeled data, and is better than using entirely automatically labeled data. However, a small amount of high-quality data, coupled with cross-lingual transfer from a related language, always offers better performance. Data and code available at: https://github.com/grvkamath/low-resource-syn-ner.
Anthology ID:
2025.ijcnlp-short.15
Volume:
Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
December
Year:
2025
Address:
Mumbai, India
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Sakriani Sakti, Haofen Wang, Derek F. Wong, Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Biplab Banerjee, Asif Ekbal, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Dhirendra Pratap Singh
Venues:
IJCNLP | AACL
SIG:
Publisher:
The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
159–167
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.ijcnlp-short.15/
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Cite (ACL):
Gaurav Kamath and Sowmya Vajjala. 2025. Does Synthetic Data Help Named Entity Recognition for Low-Resource Languages?. In Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 159–167, Mumbai, India. The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Does Synthetic Data Help Named Entity Recognition for Low-Resource Languages? (Kamath & Vajjala, IJCNLP-AACL 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.ijcnlp-short.15.pdf