GPT-NER: Named Entity Recognition via Large Language Models

Despite the fact that large-scale Language Models (LLM) have achieved SOTA performances on a variety of NLP tasks, its performance on NER is still significantly below supervised baselines. This is due to the gap between the two tasks the NER and LLMs: the former is a sequence labeling task in nature while the latter is a text-generation model. In this paper, we propose GPT-NER to resolve this issue. GPT-NER bridges the gap by transforming the sequence labeling task to a generation task that can be easily adapted by LLMs e.g., the task of finding location entities in the input text "Columbus is a city" is transformed to generate the text sequence "@@Columbus## is a city", where special tokens @@## marks the entity to extract. To efficiently address the "hallucination" issue of LLMs, where LLMs have a strong inclination to over-confidently label NULL inputs as entities, we propose a self-verification strategy by prompting LLMs to ask itself whether the extracted entities belong to a labeled entity tag. We conduct experiments on five widely adopted NER datasets, and GPT-NER achieves comparable performances to fully supervised baselines, which is the first time as far as we are concerned. More importantly, we find that GPT-NER exhibits a greater ability in the low-resource and few-shot setups, when the amount of training data is extremely scarce, GPT-NER performs significantly better than supervised models. This demonstrates the capabilities of GPT-NER in real-world NER applications where the number of labeled examples is limited.

Granular-ball computing: an efficient, robust, and interpretable adaptive multi-granularity representation and computation method

Human cognition has a ``large-scale first'' cognitive mechanism, therefore possesses adaptive multi-granularity description capabilities. This results in computational characteristics such as efficiency, robustness, and interpretability. Although most existing artificial intelligence learning methods have certain multi-granularity features, they do not fully align with the ``large-scale first'' cognitive mechanism. Multi-granularity granular-ball computing is an important model method developed in recent years. This method can use granular-balls of different sizes to adaptively represent and cover the sample space, and perform learning based on granular-balls. Since the number of coarse-grained "granular-ball" is smaller than the number of sample points, granular-ball computing is more efficient; the coarse-grained characteristics of granular-balls are less likely to be affected by fine-grained sample points, making them more robust; the multi-granularity structure of granular-balls can produce topological structures and coarse-grained descriptions, providing natural interpretability. Granular-ball computing has now been effectively extended to various fields of artificial intelligence, developing theoretical methods such as granular-ball classifiers, granular-ball clustering methods, granular-ball neural networks, granular-ball rough sets, and granular-ball evolutionary computation, significantly improving the efficiency, noise robustness, and interpretability of existing methods. It has good innovation, practicality, and development potential. This article provides a systematic introduction to these methods and analyzes the main problems currently faced by granular-ball computing, discussing both the primary applicable scenarios for granular-ball computing and offering references and suggestions for future researchers to improve this theory.

Granular ball computing: an efficient, robust, and interpretable adaptive multi-granularity representation and computation method

Human cognition has a ``large-scale first'' cognitive mechanism, therefore possesses adaptive multi-granularity description capabilities. This results in computational characteristics such as efficiency, robustness, and interpretability. Although most existing artificial intelligence learning methods have certain multi-granularity features, they do not fully align with the ``large-scale first'' cognitive mechanism. Multi-granularity granular-ball computing is an important model method developed in recent years. This method can use granular-balls of different sizes to adaptively represent and cover the sample space, and perform learning based on granular-balls. Since the number of coarse-grained "granular-ball" is smaller than the number of sample points, granular-ball computing is more efficient; the coarse-grained characteristics of granular-balls are less likely to be affected by fine-grained sample points, making them more robust; the multi-granularity structure of granular-balls can produce topological structures and coarse-grained descriptions, providing natural interpretability. Granular-ball computing has now been effectively extended to various fields of artificial intelligence, developing theoretical methods such as granular-ball classifiers, granular-ball clustering methods, granular-ball neural networks, granular-ball rough sets, and granular-ball evolutionary computation, significantly improving the efficiency, noise robustness, and interpretability of existing methods. It has good innovation, practicality, and development potential. This article provides a systematic introduction to these methods and analyzes the main problems currently faced by granular-ball computing, discussing both the primary applicable scenarios for granular-ball computing and offering references and suggestions for future researchers to improve this theory.

Granular-ball Optimization Algorithm

The existing intelligent optimization algorithms are designed based on the finest granularity, i.e., a point. This leads to weak global search ability and inefficiency. To address this problem, we proposed a novel multi-granularity optimization algorithm, namely granular-ball optimization algorithm (GBO), by introducing granular-ball computing. GBO uses many granular-balls to cover the solution space. Quite a lot of small and fine-grained granular-balls are used to depict the important parts, and a little number of large and coarse-grained granular-balls are used to depict the inessential parts. Fine multi-granularity data description ability results in a higher global search capability and faster convergence speed. In comparison with the most popular and state-of-the-art algorithms, the experiments on twenty benchmark functions demonstrate its better performance. The faster speed, higher approximation ability of optimal solution, no hyper-parameters, and simpler design of GBO make it an all-around replacement of most of the existing popular intelligent optimization algorithms.

Open World Classification with Adaptive Negative Samples

Open world classification is a task in natural language processing with key practical relevance and impact. Since the open or {\em unknown} category data only manifests in the inference phase, finding a model with a suitable decision boundary accommodating for the identification of known classes and discrimination of the open category is challenging. The performance of existing models is limited by the lack of effective open category data during the training stage or the lack of a good mechanism to learn appropriate decision boundaries. We propose an approach based on \underline{a}daptive \underline{n}egative \underline{s}amples (ANS) designed to generate effective synthetic open category samples in the training stage and without requiring any prior knowledge or external datasets. Empirically, we find a significant advantage in using auxiliary one-versus-rest binary classifiers, which effectively utilize the generated negative samples and avoid the complex threshold-seeking stage in previous works. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets show that ANS achieves significant improvements over state-of-the-art methods.

Research on Efficient Fuzzy Clustering Method Based on Local Fuzzy Granular balls

In recent years, the problem of fuzzy clustering has been widely concerned. The membership iteration of existing methods is mostly considered globally, which has considerable problems in noisy environments, and iterative calculations for clusters with a large number of different sample sizes are not accurate and efficient. In this paper, starting from the strategy of large-scale priority, the data is fuzzy iterated using granular-balls, and the membership degree of data only considers the two granular-balls where it is located, thus improving the efficiency of iteration. The formed fuzzy granular-balls set can use more processing methods in the face of different data scenarios, which enhances the practicability of fuzzy clustering calculations.

GBMST: An Efficient Minimum Spanning Tree Clustering Based on Granular-Ball

Most of the existing clustering methods are based on a single granularity of information, such as the distance and density of each data. This most fine-grained based approach is usually inefficient and susceptible to noise. Therefore, we propose a clustering algorithm that combines multi-granularity Granular-Ball and minimum spanning tree (MST). We construct coarsegrained granular-balls, and then use granular-balls and MST to implement the clustering method based on "large-scale priority", which can greatly avoid the influence of outliers and accelerate the construction process of MST. Experimental results on several data sets demonstrate the power of the algorithm. All codes have been released at https://github.com/xjnine/GBMST.

PK-ICR: Persona-Knowledge Interactive Context Retrieval for Grounded Dialogue

Identifying relevant Persona or Knowledge for conversational systems is a critical component of grounded dialogue response generation. However, each grounding has been studied in isolation with more practical multi-context tasks only recently introduced. We define Persona and Knowledge Dual Context Identification as the task to identify Persona and Knowledge jointly for a given dialogue, which could be of elevated importance in complex multi-context Dialogue settings. We develop a novel grounding retrieval method that utilizes all contexts of dialogue simultaneously while also requiring limited training via zero-shot inference due to compatibility with neural Q \& A retrieval models. We further analyze the hard-negative behavior of combining Persona and Dialogue via our novel null-positive rank test.

Sketch Less Face Image Retrieval: A New Challenge

In some specific scenarios, face sketch was used to identify a person. However, drawing a complete face sketch often needs skills and takes time, which hinder its widespread applicability in the practice. In this study, we proposed a new task named sketch less face image retrieval (SLFIR), in which the retrieval was carried out at each stroke and aim to retrieve the target face photo using a partial sketch with as few strokes as possible (see Fig.1). Firstly, we developed a method to generate the data of sketch with drawing process, and opened such dataset; Secondly, we proposed a two-stage method as the baseline for SLFIR that (1) A triplet network, was first adopt to learn the joint embedding space shared between the complete sketch and its target face photo; (2) Regarding the sketch drawing episode as a sequence, we designed a LSTM module to optimize the representation of the incomplete face sketch. Experiments indicate that the new framework can finish the retrieval using a partial or pool drawing sketch.