Template-free Prompt Tuning for Few-shot NER
Ruotian Ma, Xin Zhou, Tao Gui, Yiding Tan, Linyang Li, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
Abstract
Prompt-based methods have been successfully applied in sentence-level few-shot learning tasks, mostly owing to the sophisticated design of templates and label words. However, when applied to token-level labeling tasks such as NER, it would be time-consuming to enumerate the template queries over all potential entity spans. In this work, we propose a more elegant method to reformulate NER tasks as LM problems without any templates. Specifically, we discard the template construction process while maintaining the word prediction paradigm of pre-training models to predict a class-related pivot word (or label word) at the entity position. Meanwhile, we also explore principled ways to automatically search for appropriate label words that the pre-trained models can easily adapt to. While avoiding the complicated template-based process, the proposed LM objective also reduces the gap between different objectives used in pre-training and fine-tuning, thus it can better benefit the few-shot performance. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method over bert-tagger and template-based method under few-shot settings. Moreover, the decoding speed of the proposed method is up to 1930.12 times faster than the template-based method.- Anthology ID:
- 2022.naacl-main.420
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2022
- Address:
- Seattle, United States
- Editors:
- Marine Carpuat, Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Ivan Vladimir Meza Ruiz
- Venue:
- NAACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 5721–5732
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2022.naacl-main.420
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2022.naacl-main.420
- Cite (ACL):
- Ruotian Ma, Xin Zhou, Tao Gui, Yiding Tan, Linyang Li, Qi Zhang, and Xuanjing Huang. 2022. Template-free Prompt Tuning for Few-shot NER. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 5721–5732, Seattle, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Template-free Prompt Tuning for Few-shot NER (Ma et al., NAACL 2022)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ml4al-ingestion/2022.naacl-main.420.pdf
- Code
- rtmaww/EntLM
- Data
- CoNLL 2003