SpanNER: Named Entity Re-/Recognition as Span Prediction

By Jinlan Fu, Xuanjing Huang, Pengfei Liu. 2021

134 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Recent years have seen the paradigm shift of Named Entity Recognition (NER) systems from sequence labeling to span prediction. Despite its preliminary effectiveness, the span prediction model’s architectural bias has not been fully understood. In this paper, we first investigate the strengths and weaknesses when the span prediction model is used for named entity recognition compared with the sequence labeling framework and how to further improve it, which motivates us to make complementary advantages of systems based on different paradigms. We then reveal that span prediction, simultaneously, can serve as a system combiner to re-recognize named entities from different systems’ outputs. We experimentally implement 154 systems on 11 datasets, covering three languages, comprehensive results show the effectiveness of span prediction models that both serve as base NER systems and system combiners. We make all codes and datasets available: https://github.com/neulab/spanner, as well as an online system demo: http://spanner.sh. Our model also has been deployed into the ExplainaBoard platform, which allows users to flexibly perform a system combination of top-scoring systems in an interactive way: http://explainaboard.nlpedia.ai/leaderboard/task-ner/.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Management Science and Operations Research, Natural Language Processing

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Citations in the corpus

Pre-train, Prompt, and Predict: A Systematic Survey of Prompting Methods in Natural Language Processing (2021, background): “Empirically, for those token [81] or span [30] prediction tasks (e.”