Few-Shot Named Entity Recognition: An Empirical Baseline Study

Jiaxin Huang, Chunyuan Li, Krishan Subudhi, Damien Jose, Shobana Balakrishnan, Weizhu Chen, Baolin Peng, Jianfeng Gao, Jiawei Han


Abstract
This paper presents an empirical study to efficiently build named entity recognition (NER) systems when a small amount of in-domain labeled data is available. Based upon recent Transformer-based self-supervised pre-trained language models (PLMs), we investigate three orthogonal schemes to improve model generalization ability in few-shot settings: (1) meta-learning to construct prototypes for different entity types, (2) task-specific supervised pre-training on noisy web data to extract entity-related representations and (3) self-training to leverage unlabeled in-domain data. On 10 public NER datasets, we perform extensive empirical comparisons over the proposed schemes and their combinations with various proportions of labeled data, our experiments show that (i)in the few-shot learning setting, the proposed NER schemes significantly improve or outperform the commonly used baseline, a PLM-based linear classifier fine-tuned using domain labels. (ii) We create new state-of-the-art results on both few-shot and training-free settings compared with existing methods.
Anthology ID:
2021.emnlp-main.813
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
10408–10423
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.813
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.813
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jiaxin Huang, Chunyuan Li, Krishan Subudhi, Damien Jose, Shobana Balakrishnan, Weizhu Chen, Baolin Peng, Jianfeng Gao, and Jiawei Han. 2021. Few-Shot Named Entity Recognition: An Empirical Baseline Study. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 10408–10423, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Few-Shot Named Entity Recognition: An Empirical Baseline Study (Huang et al., EMNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-1/2021.emnlp-main.813.pdf
Video:
 https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-1/2021.emnlp-main.813.mp4
Data
CoNLL 2003SNIPSWNUT 2017