TECA: A Two-stage Approach with Controllable Attention Soft Prompt for Few-shot Nested Named Entity Recognition

Yuanyuan Xu, Linhai Zhang, Deyu Zhou


Abstract
Few-shot nested named entity recognition (NER), identifying named entities that are nested with a small number of labeled data, has attracted much attention. Recently, a span-based method based on three stages ( focusing, bridging and prompting) has been proposed for few-shot nested NER. However, such a span-based approach for few-shot nested NER suffers from two challenges: 1) error propagation because of its 3-stage pipeline-based framework; 2) ignoring the relationship between inner and outer entities, which is crucial for few-shot nested NER. Therefore, in this work, we propose a two-stage approach with a controllable attention soft prompt for few-shot nested named entity recognition (TECA). It consists of two components: span part identification and entity mention recognition. The span part identification provides possible entity mentions without an extra filtering module. The entity mention recognition pays fine-grained attention to the inner and outer entities and the corresponding adjacent context through the controllable attention soft prompt to classify the candidate entity mentions. Experimental results show that the TECA approach achieves state-of-the-art performance consistently on the four benchmark datasets (ACE2004, ACE2005, GENIA, and KBP2017) and outperforms several competing baseline models on F1-score by 5.62% on ACE04, 5.11% on ACE05, 3.41% on KBP2017 and 0.7% on GENIA on the 10-shot setting.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.1363
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:
15698–15710
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1363
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yuanyuan Xu, Linhai Zhang, and Deyu Zhou. 2024. TECA: A Two-stage Approach with Controllable Attention Soft Prompt for Few-shot Nested Named Entity Recognition. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 15698–15710, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
TECA: A Two-stage Approach with Controllable Attention Soft Prompt for Few-shot Nested Named Entity Recognition (Xu et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1363.pdf