Improving Low-Resource Named Entity Recognition via Label-Aware Data Augmentation and Curriculum Denoising

Chinese named entity recognition method for the finance domain based on enhanced features and pretrained language models

Improving few-shot named entity recognition via Semantics induced Optimal Transport

In this investigation, we propose a solution for the author’s gender identification task called AGI-P. This task has several real-world applications across different fields, such as marketing and advertising, forensic linguistics, sociology, recommendation systems, language processing, historical analysis, education, and language learning. We created a new dataset to evaluate our proposed method. The dataset is balanced in terms of gender using a random sampling method and consists of 1944 samples in total. We use accuracy as an evaluation measure and compare the performance of the proposed solution (AGI-P) against state-of-the-art machine learning classifiers and fine-tuned pre-trained multilingual language models such as DistilBERT, mBERT, XLM-RoBERTa, and Multilingual DEBERTa. In this regard, we also propose a customized fine-tuning strategy that improves the accuracy of the pre-trained language models for the author gender identification task. Our extensive experimental studies reveal that our solution (AGI-P) outperforms the well-known machine learning classifiers and fine-tuned pre-trained multilingual language models with an accuracy level of 92.03%. Moreover, the pre-trained multilingual language models, fine-tuned with the proposed customized strategy, outperform the fine-tuned pre-trained language models using an out-of-the-box fine-tuning strategy. The codebase and the corpus will be publicly available for scholars in this area upon publication.

Korean is the native and official language spoken by Chinese-Korean people, and Weibo is a social media software with a huge number of users in China. Currently, there is few studies related to sentiment analysis of Korean-language Weibo texts posted by Chinese-Korean users. In this paper, we propose a sentiment classification method for Chinese-Korean Weibo based on pre-trained language model and transfer learning. Firstly, we crawled the Chinese-Korean Weibo data from Sina Weibo and label them with sentiment to get the Chinese-Korean Weibo sentiment analysis (CKWSA) dataset. Secondly, to solve the problem of few training samples of the Chinese-Korean Weibo sentiment analysis dataset, we fine-tune the classifier based on the pre-trained Korean language model on the Korean Twitter sentiment analysis dataset to obtain the Korean Twitter sentiment classification model; and further fine-tune the model on CKWSA dataset to get Chinese-Korean Weibo sentiment classification model. The experiments show that the proposed classification method based on pre-trained language model and transfer learning has great performance, and there is an improvement compared other baselines on the Chinese-Korean Weibo sentiment analysis dataset.

PurposeSafety management plays an important part in coal mine construction. Due to complex data, the implementation of the construction safety knowledge scattered in standards poses a challenge. This paper aims to develop a knowledge extraction model to automatically and efficiently extract domain knowledge from unstructured texts.Design/methodology/approachBidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT)-bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM)-conditional random field (CRF) method based on a pre-training language model was applied to carry out knowledge entity recognition in the field of coal mine construction safety in this paper. Firstly, 80 safety standards for coal mine construction were collected, sorted out and marked as a descriptive corpus. Then, the BERT pre-training language model was used to obtain dynamic word vectors. Finally, the BiLSTM-CRF model concluded the entity’s optimal tag sequence.FindingsAccordingly, 11,933 entities and 2,051 relationships in the standard specifications texts of this paper were identified and a language model suitable for coal mine construction safety management was proposed. The experiments showed that F1 values were all above 60% in nine types of entities such as security management. F1 value of this model was more than 60% for entity extraction. The model identified and extracted entities more accurately than conventional methods.Originality/valueThis work completed the domain knowledge query and built a Q&A platform via entities and relationships identified by the standard specifications suitable for coal mines. This paper proposed a systematic framework for texts in coal mine construction safety to improve efficiency and accuracy of domain-specific entity extraction. In addition, the pretraining language model was also introduced into the coal mine construction safety to realize dynamic entity recognition, which provides technical support and theoretical reference for the optimization of safety management platforms.

In domain-specific named entity recognition (NER), the out-of-vocabulary (OOV) problem arises due to linguistic features and rare vocabulary.OOV problem is particularly challenging in agglutinative languages such as Korean.The irregular decomposition of morphemes makes it difficult to represent all of them in language model dictionaries, resulting in poor NER performance.Subword tokenization which segments a word into atomic tokens that are no longer divided can be one of the possible solutions.In the construction industry, existing NER methods do not effective on housing defect complaints which contain many rare words, including jargon, slang, and typos.To address this challenge, we propose subword tokenization algorithms that can mitigate OOV problems based on considering linguistic features and pre-trained language models (PLMs).The primary objective of this study is to identify the optimal NER performance by comparing different subword tokenization methods depending on the language models used.For domain-specific NER, we defined and used 23 defectspecific named entity tags for dataset labelling.We then experimented with a total of three state-of-theart language models: one SentencePiece-based and two WordPiece-based subword tokenization models.The results demonstrate that the SentencePiece-based Korean Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (KoBERT) outperformed the two WordPiece-based language models (multilingual-BERT and Korean Efficiently Learning an Encoder that Classifies Token Replacements Accurately (KoELECTRA)) with an F1 score of 84.7%.The proposed method is expected to improve not only NER but also other downstream tasks that involve using Korean documents in the construction industry.

Medical named entity recognition can assist doctors to quickly identifying key content and improving clinical work efficiency. Chinese named entity recognition methods based on pre-trained language models have achieved remarkable performance. However, most of these models have the following problems for medical named entity recognition: these models are designed for flat named entity recognition tasks but not for nested entities. Furthermore, the medical entities are hard to be recognized due to the lack of medical domain knowledge. To tackle these problems, we propose a Chinese medical nested named entity recognition model based on feature fusion and a bidirectional lattice embedding graph. The problem of poor recognition of medical entities due to the lack of medical domain knowledge is solved by introducing a medical lexicon. The problem of Chinese polyphonic characters with different meanings in the same form is solved by introducing pinyin information. The model considers the similarity between different entity types to improve the model’s effectiveness. The results on a Chinese medical nested named entity dataset CBLUE-CMeEE demonstrate the outperform performance and effectiveness of the model.

Data augmentation (DA) methods have been proven to be effective for pre-trained language models (PLMs) in low-resource settings, including few-shot named entity recognition (NER).However, existing NER DA techniques either perform rule-based manipulations on words that break the semantic coherence of the sentence, or exploit generative models for entity or context substitution, which requires a substantial amount of labeled data and contradicts the objective of operating in low-resource settings.In this work, we propose orderagnostic data augmentation (OADA), an alternative solution that exploits the often overlooked order-agnostic property in the training data construction phase of sequence-tosequence NER methods for data augmentation.To effectively utilize the augmented data without suffering from the one-to-many issue, where multiple augmented target sequences exist for one single sentence, we further propose the use of ordering instructions and an innovative OADA-XE loss.Specifically, by treating each permutation of entity types as an ordering instruction, we rearrange the entity set accordingly, ensuring a distinct input-output pair, while OADA-XE assigns loss based on the best match between the target sequence and model predictions.We conduct comprehensive experiments and analyses across three major NER benchmarks and can significantly enhance the few-shot capabilities of PLMs with OADA.Our code is available at https://github.com/Circle-Ming/OADA-NER.

BackgroundClinical trial protocols are the foundation for advancing medical sciences, however, the extraction of accurate and meaningful information from the original clinical trials is very challenging due to the complex and unstructured texts of such documents. Named entity recognition (NER) is a fundamental and necessary step to process and standardize the unstructured text in clinical trials using Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques.MethodsIn this study we fine-tuned pre-trained language models to support the NER task on clinical trial eligibility criteria. We systematically investigated four pre-trained contextual embedding models for the biomedical domain (i.e., BioBERT, BlueBERT, PubMedBERT, and SciBERT) and two models for the open domains (BERT and SpanBERT), for NER tasks using three existing clinical trial eligibility criteria corpora. In addition, we also investigated the feasibility of data augmentation approaches and evaluated their performance.ResultsOur evaluation results using tenfold cross-validation show that domain-specific transformer models achieved better performance than the general transformer models, with the best performance obtained by the PubMedBERT model (F1-scores of 0.715, 0.836, and 0.622 for the three corpora respectively). The data augmentation results show that it is feasible to leverage additional corpora to improve NER performance.ConclusionsFindings from this study not only demonstrate the importance of contextual embeddings trained from domain-specific corpora, but also shed lights on the benefits of leveraging multiple data sources for the challenging NER task in clinical trial eligibility criteria text.

This paper describes the models designated for the MEDIQA 2019 shared tasks by the team PANLP. We take advantages of the recent advances in pre-trained bidirectional transformer language models such as BERT (Devlin et al., 2018) and MT-DNN (Liu et al., 2019b). We find that pre-trained language models can significantly outperform traditional deep learning models. Transfer learning from the NLI task to the RQE task is also experimented, which proves to be useful in improving the results of fine-tuning MT-DNN large. A knowledge distillation process is implemented, to distill the knowledge contained in a set of models and transfer it into an single model, whose performance turns out to be comparable with that obtained by the ensemble of that set of models. Finally, for test submissions, model ensemble and a re-ranking process are implemented to boost the performances. Our models participated in all three tasks and ranked the 1st place for the RQE task, and the 2nd place for the NLI task, and also the 2nd place for the QA task.

Event extraction as machine reading comprehension with question-context bridging

Intent classification (IC) and Named Entity Recognition (NER) are arguably the two main components needed to build a Natural Language Understanding (NLU) engine, which is a main component of conversational agents. The IC and NER components are closely intertwined and the entities are often connected to the underlying intent. Current research has primarily focused to model IC and NER as two separate units, which results in error propagation, and thus, sub-optimal performance. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective novel framework for NLU where the parameters of the IC and the NER models are jointly trained in a consolidated parameter space. Text semantic representations are obtained from popular pre-trained contextual language models, which are fine-tuned for our task, and these parameters are propagated to other deep neural layers in our framework leading to a faithful unified modelling of the IC and NER parameters. The overall framework results in a faithful parameter sharing when the training is underway, leading to a more coherent learning. Experiments on two public datasets, ATIS and SNIPS, show that our model outperforms other methods by a noticeable margin. On the SNIPS dataset, we obtain a 1.42% improvement in NER in terms of the F1 score, and 1% improvement in intent accuracy score. On ATIS, we achieve 1.54% improvement in intent accuracy score. We also present qualitative results to showcase the effectiveness of our model.

With the recent advances in deep learning, different approaches to improving pre-trained language models (PLMs) have been proposed. PLMs have advanced state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on various natural language processing (NLP) tasks such as machine translation, text classification, question answering, text summarization, information retrieval, recommendation systems, named entity recognition, etc. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review of prior embedding models as well as current breakthroughs in the field of PLMs. Then, we analyse and contrast the various models and provide an analysis of the way they have been built (number of parameters, compression techniques, etc.). Finally, we discuss the major issues and future directions for each of the main points.

In this work, we introduce our system to the SemEval 2022 Task 11: Multilingual Complex Named Entity Recognition (MultiCoNER) competition. Our team (KDDIE) attempted the sub-task of Named Entity Recognition (NER) for the language of English in the challenge and reported our results. For this task, we use transfer learning method: fine-tuning the pre-trained language models (PLMs) on the competition dataset. Our two approaches are the BERT-based PLMs and PLMs with additional layer such as Condition Random Field. We report our finding and results in this report.

Pretrained language models have achieved great success in a wide range of natural language processing (NLP) problems, because they learn language representations from large-scale text corpora and can adapt to downstream tasks by finetuning them on annotated task data. However, such success relies on both large-scale text and annotated data, so the lack of training data is a major practical problem for many languages, especially low-resource languages. In this paper, we explore whether a pretrained English language model can benefit non-English NLP systems in low-resource scenarios, i.e., with limited text corpora or annotated data. To achieve this, we first propose cross-lingual knowledge transfer methods and then validate our methods in low-resource scenarios. Specifically, our cross-lingual knowledge transfer methods are applied in the training stages of language model pretraining or downstream finetuning. At the two stages, the methods are designed for the transfer of upstream general knowledge or downstream task-specific knowledge, respectively. In the experiments, we perform pretraining and finetuning with limited non-English data to simulate the low-resource scenarios. We evaluate our methods on ten downstream tasks over a wide range of languages, and present systematic comparisons among various knowledge transfer methods. Experimental results show that our methods successfully leverage a pretrained English language model to improve task performance in other languages. Besides, we demonstrate the multilinguality of the English language model in various application scenarios. Our findings imply the possibility to improve low-resource-language NLP systems with large-scale English language models.