A Streamlined Span-based Factorization Method for Few Shot Named Entity Recognition

Wenjie Xu, Yidan Chen, Jianquan Ouyang


Abstract
Few-shot named entity recognition (NER) is a challenging task that aims to recognize new named entities with only a limited amount of labeled examples. In this paper, we introduce SSF, which is a streamlined span-based factorization method that addresses the problem of few-shot NER. Our approach formulates few-shot NER as a span-level alignment problem between query and support instances. To achieve this goal, SSF decomposes the span-level alignment problem into several refined span-level procedures. The proposed approach encompasses several key modules such as the Span Boosting Module, Span Prototypical Module, Span Alignment Module, and Span Optimization Module. Our experimental results demonstrate a significant improvement over the previous state-of-the-art performance. Specifically, compared to previous methods, our proposed approach achieves an average F1 score improvement of 12 points on the FewNERD dataset and 10 points on the SNIPS dataset. Moreover, our approach has surpassed the latest state-of-the-art performance on both datasets.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.147
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
1673–1683
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.147
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Wenjie Xu, Yidan Chen, and Jianquan Ouyang. 2024. A Streamlined Span-based Factorization Method for Few Shot Named Entity Recognition. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 1673–1683, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
A Streamlined Span-based Factorization Method for Few Shot Named Entity Recognition (Xu et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2024.lrec-main.147.pdf