Few-shot classification in Named Entity Recognition Task

For many natural language processing (NLP) tasks the amount of annotated data is limited. This urges a need to apply semi-supervised learning techniques, such as transfer learning or meta-learning. In this work we tackle Named Entity Recognition (NER) task using Prototypical Network - a metric learning technique. It learns intermediate representations of words which cluster well into named entity classes. This property of the model allows classifying words with extremely limited number of training examples, and can potentially be used as a zero-shot learning method. By coupling this technique with transfer learning we achieve well-performing classifiers trained on only 20 instances of a target class.Comment: In proceedings of the 34th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computin

Improved named entity recognition using machine translation-based cross-lingual information

In this paper, we describe a technique to improve named entity recognition in a resource-poor language (Hindi) by using cross-lingual information. We use an on-line machine translation system and a separate word alignment phase to find the projection of each Hindi word into the translated English sentence. We estimate the cross-lingual features using an English named entity recognizer and the alignment information. We use these cross-lingual features in a support vector machine-based classifier. The use of cross-lingual features improves F1 score by 2.1 points absolute (2.9% relative) over a good-performing baseline model