AutoTriggER: Named Entity Recognition with Auxiliary Trigger Extraction

Abstract

Deep neural models for low-resource named entity recognition (NER) have shown impressive results by leveraging distant super-vision or other meta-level information (e.g. explanation). However, the costs of acquiring such additional information are generally prohibitive, especially in domains where existing resources (e.g. databases to be used for distant supervision) may not exist. In this paper, we present a novel two-stage framework (AutoTriggER) to improve NER performance by automatically generating and leveraging "entity triggers" which are essentially human-readable clues in the text that can help guide the model to make better decisions. Thus, the framework is able to both create and leverage auxiliary supervision by itself. Through experiments on three well-studied NER datasets, we show that our automatically extracted triggers are well-matched to human triggers, and AutoTriggER improves performance over a RoBERTa-CRFarchitecture by nearly 0.5 F1 points on average and much more in a low resource setting.Comment: 10 pages, 12 figures, Best paper at TrustNLP@NAACL 2021 and presented at WeaSuL@ICLR 202