Local Additivity Based Data Augmentation for Semi-supervised NER

Jiaao Chen, Zhenghui Wang, Ran Tian, Zichao Yang, Diyi Yang


Abstract
Named Entity Recognition (NER) is one of the first stages in deep language understanding yet current NER models heavily rely on human-annotated data. In this work, to alleviate the dependence on labeled data, we propose a Local Additivity based Data Augmentation (LADA) method for semi-supervised NER, in which we create virtual samples by interpolating sequences close to each other. Our approach has two variations: Intra-LADA and Inter-LADA, where Intra-LADA performs interpolations among tokens within one sentence, and Inter-LADA samples different sentences to interpolate. Through linear additions between sampled training data, LADA creates an infinite amount of labeled data and improves both entity and context learning. We further extend LADA to the semi-supervised setting by designing a novel consistency loss for unlabeled data. Experiments conducted on two NER benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods over several strong baselines. We have publicly released our code at https://github.com/GT-SALT/LADA
Anthology ID:
2020.emnlp-main.95
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Bonnie Webber, Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1241–1251
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.95
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.95
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jiaao Chen, Zhenghui Wang, Ran Tian, Zichao Yang, and Diyi Yang. 2020. Local Additivity Based Data Augmentation for Semi-supervised NER. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 1241–1251, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Local Additivity Based Data Augmentation for Semi-supervised NER (Chen et al., EMNLP 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.95.pdf
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38938834
Code
 GT-SALT/LADA
Data
CoNLL 2003