This paper presents the two submissions of NamedEntityRangers Team to the MultiCoNER Shared Task, hosted at SemEval-2022. We evaluate two state-of-the-art approaches, of which both utilize pre-trained multi-lingual language models differently. The first approach follows the token classification schema, in which each token is assigned with a tag. The second approach follows a recent template-free paradigm, in which an encoder-decoder model translates the input sequence of words to a special output, encoding named entities with predefined labels. We utilize RemBERT and mT5 as backbone models for these two approaches, respectively. Our results show that the oldie but goodie token classification outperforms the template-free method by a wide margin. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Abiks/MultiCoNER.

In this paper, we present NEREL, a Russian dataset for named entity recognition and relation extraction. NEREL is significantly larger than existing Russian datasets: to date it contains 56K annotated named entities and 39K annotated relations. Its important difference from previous datasets is annotation of nested named entities, as well as relations within nested entities and at the discourse level. NEREL can facilitate development of novel models that can extract relations between nested named entities, as well as relations on both sentence and document levels. NEREL also contains the annotation of events involving named entities and their roles in the events. The NEREL collection is available via https://github.com/nerel-ds/NEREL.