Abstract
Few-shot named entity recognition (NER) aims to leverage a small number of labeled examples to extract novel-class named entities from unstructured text. Although existing few-shot NER methods, such as ESD and DecomposedMetaNER, are effective, they are quite complex and not efficient, which makes them unsuitable for real-world applications when the prediction time is a critical factor. In this paper, we propose a simple span-based prototypical framework that follows the metric-based meta-learning paradigm and does not require time-consuming fine-tuning. In addition, the BERT encoding process in our model can be pre-computed and cached, making the final inference process even faster. Experiment results show that, compared with the state-of-the-art models, the proposed framework can achieve comparable effectiveness with much better efficiency.
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Acknowledgements
We greatly thanks all reviewers for their constructive comments. The research was supported as part of the Center for Plastics Innovation, an Energy Frontier Research Center, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences (BES), under Award Number DE-SC0021166. The research was also supported in part through the use of DARWIN computing system: DARWIN - A Resource for Computational and Data-intensive Research at the University of Delaware and in the Delaware Region, Rudolf Eigenmann, Benjamin E. Bagozzi, Arthi Jayaraman, William Totten, and Cathy H. Wu, University of Delaware, 2021, URL: https://udspace.udel.edu/handle/19716/29071.
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Zhang, Y., Fang, H. (2023). Less is More: A Prototypical Framework for Efficient Few-Shot Named Entity Recognition. In: Métais, E., Meziane, F., Sugumaran, V., Manning, W., Reiff-Marganiec, S. (eds) Natural Language Processing and Information Systems. NLDB 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13913. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35320-8_3
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