2INER: Instructive and In-Context Learning on Few-Shot Named Entity Recognition

Jiasheng Zhang, Xikai Liu, Xinyi Lai, Yan Gao, Shusen Wang, Yao Hu, Yiqing Lin


Abstract
Prompt-based learning has emerged as a powerful technique in natural language processing (NLP) due to its ability to leverage pre-training knowledge for downstream few-shot tasks. In this paper, we propose 2INER, a novel text-to-text framework for Few-Shot Named Entity Recognition (NER) tasks. Our approach employs instruction finetuning based on InstructionNER to enable the model to effectively comprehend and process task-specific instructions, including both main and auxiliary tasks. We also introduce a new auxiliary task, called Type Extracting, to enhance the model’s understanding of entity types in the overall semantic context of a sentence. To facilitate in-context learning, we concatenate examples to the input, enabling the model to learn from additional contextual information. Experimental results on four datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing Few-Shot NER methods and remains competitive with state-of-the-art standard NER algorithms.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.259
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3940–3951
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.259
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.259
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jiasheng Zhang, Xikai Liu, Xinyi Lai, Yan Gao, Shusen Wang, Yao Hu, and Yiqing Lin. 2023. 2INER: Instructive and In-Context Learning on Few-Shot Named Entity Recognition. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 3940–3951, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
2INER: Instructive and In-Context Learning on Few-Shot Named Entity Recognition (Zhang et al., Findings 2023)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-3/2023.findings-emnlp.259.pdf