A Little Annotation does a Lot of Good: A Study in Bootstrapping Low-resource Named Entity Recognizers

Aditi Chaudhary, Jiateng Xie, Zaid Sheikh, Graham Neubig, Jaime Carbonell


Abstract
Most state-of-the-art models for named entity recognition (NER) rely on the availability of large amounts of labeled data, making them challenging to extend to new, lower-resourced languages. However, there are now many proposed solutions to this problem involving either cross-lingual transfer learning, which learns from other highly resourced languages, or active learning, which efficiently selects effective training data based on model predictions. In this paper, we ask the question: given this recent progress, and some amount of human annotation, what is the most effective method for efficiently creating high-quality entity recognizers in under-resourced languages? Based on extensive experimentation using both simulated and real human annotation, we settle on a recipe of starting with a cross-lingual transferred model, then performing targeted annotation of only uncertain entity spans in the target language, minimizing annotator effort. Results demonstrate that cross-lingual transfer is a powerful tool when very little data can be annotated, but an entity-targeted annotation strategy can achieve competitive accuracy quickly, with just one-tenth of training data.
Anthology ID:
D19-1520
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Jing Jiang, Vincent Ng, Xiaojun Wan
Venues:
EMNLP | IJCNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5164–5174
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1520
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1520
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Aditi Chaudhary, Jiateng Xie, Zaid Sheikh, Graham Neubig, and Jaime Carbonell. 2019. A Little Annotation does a Lot of Good: A Study in Bootstrapping Low-resource Named Entity Recognizers. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pages 5164–5174, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Little Annotation does a Lot of Good: A Study in Bootstrapping Low-resource Named Entity Recognizers (Chaudhary et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1520.pdf
Attachment:
 D19-1520.Attachment.pdf
Code
 Aditi138/EntityTargetedActiveLearning