Abstract
To alleviate the scarcity of manually annotated data in Named Entity Recognition (NER) tasks, data augmentation methods can be applied to automatically generate labeled data and improve performance of existing methods. However, based on manipulations of the input text, current techniques may generate too many noisy and mislabeled samples. In this paper we propose COntext SImilarity-based data augmentation for NER (COSINER), a method for NER data augmentation based on context similarity, i.e. we replace entity mentions with the most plausible ones based on the available training data and the contexts in which entities usually appear. We conduct experiments on popular benchmark datasets, showing that our method outperforms current baselines in various few-shot scenarios, where training data is assumed to be strongly limited. Experimental results show that not only does COSINER overcome baselines in terms of NER performances in highly-limited scenarios (2%, 5%), but also its computing times are comparable to simplest augmentation methods.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Our best results are obtained with the maximum similarity and local augmentation methods for similarity and augmentation set computation, respectively. In Sect. 4.2 we compare all the different approaches.
- 3.
We have not considered the execution time required to generate Lexicon and embeddings, since they are one-time operations that can be performed off-line.
References
Cai, H., Chen, H., Song, Y., Zhang, C., Zhao, X., Yin, D.: Data manipulation: towards effective instance learning for neural dialogue generation via learning to augment and reweight. In: Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 6334–6343. Association for Computational Linguistics (2020)
Wei, J., Zou, K.: EDA: easy data augmentation techniques for boosting performance on text classification tasks. In: Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), Hong Kong, China, pp. 6382–6388. Association for Computational Linguistics (2019)
Min, J., McCoy, R.T., Das, D., Pitler, E., Linzen, T.: Syntactic data augmentation increases robustness to inference heuristics. In: Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 2339–2352. Association for Computational Linguistics (2020)
Yoo, K.M., Shin, Y., Lee, S.G.: Data augmentation for spoken language understanding via joint variational generation. In: Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, vol. 33, pp. 7402–7409 (2019)
Dai, X., Adel, H.: An analysis of simple data augmentation for named entity recognition. In: Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Barcelona, Spain, pp. 3861–3867. International Committee on Computational Linguistics (2020)
Postiglione, M.: Towards an Italian healthcare knowledge graph. In: Reyes, N., et al. (eds.) SISAP 2021. LNCS, vol. 13058, pp. 387–394. Springer, Cham (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89657-7_29
Wang, X., Hu, V., Song, X., Garg, S., Xiao, J., Han, J.: ChemNER: fine-grained chemistry named entity recognition with ontology-guided distant supervision. In: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, pp. 5227–5240. Association for Computational Linguistics (2021)
Gekhman, Z., Aharoni, R., Beryozkin, G., Freitag, M., Macherey, W.: KoBE: knowledge-based machine translation evaluation. In: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020, pp. 3200–3207. Association for Computational Linguistics (2020)
Li, B.Z., Min, S., Iyer, S., Mehdad, Y., Yih, W.T.: Efficient one-pass end-to-end entity linking for questions. In: Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pp. 6433–6441. Association for Computational Linguistics (2020)
Alshammari, N., Alanazi, S.: The impact of using different annotation schemes on named entity recognition. Egypt. Inform. J. 22(3), 295–302 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eij.2020.10.004
Li, J., Sun, A., Han, J., Li, C.: A survey on deep learning for named entity recognition. IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng. 1 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1109/TKDE.2020.2981314
Schmidhuber, J.: On learning how to learn learning strategies (1995)
Henderson, M., Vulić, I.: ConVEx: data-efficient and few-shot slot labeling. arXiv:2010.11791 [cs] (2020)
Shen, Y., Yun, H., Lipton, Z.C., Kronrod, Y., Anandkumar, A.: Deep active learning for named entity recognition. arXiv:1707.05928 [cs] (2018)
Lou, Y., Qian, T., Li, F., Ji, D.: A graph attention model for dictionary-guided named entity recognition. IEEE Access 8, 71584–71592 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2020.2987399
Huang, J., et al.: Few-shot named entity recognition: a comprehensive study. arXiv:2012.14978 [cs] (2020)
Ding, B., et al.: DAGA: data augmentation with a generation approach for low-resource tagging tasks. In: Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pp. 6045–6057. Association for Computational Linguistics (2020)
Miller, G.A.: WordNet: a lexical database for English. Commun. ACM. 38(11), 39–41 (1995). https://doi.org/10.1145/219717.219748
Chen, S., Aguilar, G., Neves, L., Solorio, T.: Data augmentation for cross-domain named entity recognition. In: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, pp. 5346–5356. Association for Computational Linguistics (2021)
Devlin, J., Chang, M.W., Lee, K., Toutanova, K.: BERT: pre-training of deep bidirectional transformers for language understanding. In: Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Minneapolis, Minnesota, vol. 1, pp. 4171–4186. Association for Computational Linguistics (2019)
Brown, T., et al.: Language models are few-shot learners. In: Larochelle, H., Ranzato, M., Hadsell, R., Balcan, M.F., Lin, H. (eds.) Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, vol. 33, pp. 1877–1901. Curran Associates Inc. (2020)
Ramshaw, L.A., Marcus, M.P.: Text chunking using transformation-based learning. In: Armstrong, S., Church, K., Isabelle, P., Manzi, S., Tzoukermann, E., Yarowsky, D. (eds.) Natural Language Processing Using Very Large Corpora, pp. 157–176. Springer, Cham (1999). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2390-9_10
Doğan, R., Leaman, R., Lu, Z.: NCBI disease corpus: a resource for disease name recognition and concept normalization. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24393765/
Li, J., et al.: BioCreative V CDR task corpus: a resource for chemical disease relation extraction. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4860626/
Smith, L., Tanabe, L.K., nee Ando, R.J., et al.: The BioCreative II - critical assessment for information extraction in biology challenge. https://doi.org/10.1186/gb-2008-9-s2-s2
Schick, T., Schütze, H.: Exploiting cloze-questions for few-shot text classification and natural language inference. In: Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume, pp. 255–269. Association for Computational Linguistics (2021)
Lee, J., Yoon, W., Kim, S., Kim, D., Kim, S., So, C.H., et al.: BioBERT: a pre-trained biomedical language representation model for biomedical text mining. Bioinformatics 36(4), 1234–1240 (2020)
Loshchilov, I., Hutter, F.: Decoupled weight decay regularization. In: ICLR (2019)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Bartolini, I., Moscato, V., Postiglione, M., Sperlì, G., Vignali, A. (2022). COSINER: COntext SImilarity data augmentation for Named Entity Recognition. In: Skopal, T., Falchi, F., Lokoč, J., Sapino, M.L., Bartolini, I., Patella, M. (eds) Similarity Search and Applications. SISAP 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13590. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17849-8_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17849-8_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-17848-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-17849-8
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)