Mitigating Out-of-Entity Errors in Named Entity Recognition: A Sentence-Level Strategy

Many previous models of named entity recognition (NER) suffer from the problem of Out-of-Entity (OOE), i.e., the tokens in the entity mentions of the test samples have not appeared in the training samples, which hinders the achievement of satisfactory performance. To improve OOE-NER performance, in this paper, we propose a new framework, namely S+NER, which fully leverages sentence-level information. Our S+NER achieves better OOE-NER performance mainly due to the following two particular designs. 1) It first exploits the pre-trained language model's capability of understanding the target entity's sentence-level context with a template set. 2) Then, it refines the sentence-level representation based on the positive and negative templates, through a contrastive learning strategy and template pooling method, to obtain better NER results. Our extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets have demonstrated that, our S+NER outperforms some state-of-the-art OOE-NER models.

Text2Insight: Transform natural language text into insights seamlessly using multi-model architecture

The growing demand for dynamic, user-centric data analysis and visualization is evident across domains like healthcare, finance, and research. Traditional visualization tools often fail to meet individual user needs due to their static and predefined nature. To address this gap, Text2Insight is introduced as an innovative solution that delivers customized data analysis and visualizations based on user-defined natural language requirements. Leveraging a multi-model architecture, Text2Insight transforms user inputs into actionable insights and dynamic visualizations. The methodology begins with analyzing the input dataset to extract structural details such as columns and values. A pre-trained Llama3 model converts the user's natural language query into an SQL query, which is further refined using a Named Entity Recognition (NER) model for accuracy. A chart predictor determines the most suitable visualization type, while the Llama3 model generates insights based on the SQL query's results. The output is a user-friendly and visually informative chart. To enhance analysis capabilities, the system integrates a question-answering model and a predictive model using the BERT framework. These models provide insights into historical data and predict future trends. Performance evaluation of Text2Insight demonstrates its effectiveness, achieving high accuracy (99%), precision (100%), recall (99%), and F1-score (99%), with a BLEU score of 0.5. The question-answering model attained an accuracy of 89% and the predictive model achieved 70% accuracy. These results validate Text2Insight as a robust and viable solution for transforming natural language text into dynamic, user-specific data analysis and visualizations.

Semi-Supervised Learning from Small Annotated Data and Large Unlabeled Data for Fine-grained PICO Entity Recognition

Objective: Extracting PICO elements -- Participants, Intervention, Comparison, and Outcomes -- from clinical trial literature is essential for clinical evidence retrieval, appraisal, and synthesis. Existing approaches do not distinguish the attributes of PICO entities. This study aims to develop a named entity recognition (NER) model to extract PICO entities with fine granularities. Materials and Methods: Using a corpus of 2,511 abstracts with PICO mentions from 4 public datasets, we developed a semi-supervised method to facilitate the training of a NER model, FinePICO, by combining limited annotated data of PICO entities and abundant unlabeled data. For evaluation, we divided the entire dataset into two subsets: a smaller group with annotations and a larger group without annotations. We then established the theoretical lower and upper performance bounds based on the performance of supervised learning models trained solely on the small, annotated subset and on the entire set with complete annotations, respectively. Finally, we evaluated FinePICO on both the smaller annotated subset and the larger, initially unannotated subset. We measured the performance of FinePICO using precision, recall, and F1. Results: Our method achieved precision/recall/F1 of 0.567/0.636/0.60, respectively, using a small set of annotated samples, outperforming the baseline model (F1: 0.437) by more than 16\%. The model demonstrates generalizability to a different PICO framework and to another corpus, which consistently outperforms the benchmark in diverse experimental settings (p-value \textless0.001). Conclusion: This study contributes a generalizable and effective semi-supervised approach to named entity recognition leveraging large unlabeled data together with small, annotated data. It also initially supports fine-grained PICO extraction.

The Use of Artificial Intelligence in Military Intelligence: An Experimental Investigation of Added Value in the Analysis Process

It is beyond dispute that the potential benefits of artificial intelligence (AI) in military intelligence are considerable. Nevertheless, it remains uncertain precisely how AI can enhance the analysis of military data. The aim of this study is to address this issue. To this end, the AI demonstrator deepCOM was developed in collaboration with the start-up Aleph Alpha. The AI functions include text search, automatic text summarization and Named Entity Recognition (NER). These are evaluated for their added value in military analysis. It is demonstrated that under time pressure, the utilization of AI functions results in assessments clearly superior to that of the control group. Nevertheless, despite the demonstrably superior analysis outcome in the experimental group, no increase in confidence in the accuracy of their own analyses was observed. Finally, the paper identifies the limitations of employing AI in military intelligence, particularly in the context of analyzing ambiguous and contradictory information.

Few-Shot Domain Adaptation for Named-Entity Recognition via Joint Constrained k-Means and Subspace Selection

Named-entity recognition (NER) is a task that typically requires large annotated datasets, which limits its applicability across domains with varying entity definitions. This paper addresses few-shot NER, aiming to transfer knowledge to new domains with minimal supervision. Unlike previous approaches that rely solely on limited annotated data, we propose a weakly supervised algorithm that combines small labeled datasets with large amounts of unlabeled data. Our method extends the k-means algorithm with label supervision, cluster size constraints and domain-specific discriminative subspace selection. This unified framework achieves state-of-the-art results in few-shot NER on several English datasets.

BANER: Boundary-Aware LLMs for Few-Shot Named Entity Recognition

Despite the recent success of two-stage prototypical networks in few-shot named entity recognition (NER), challenges such as over/under-detected false spans in the span detection stage and unaligned entity prototypes in the type classification stage persist. Additionally, LLMs have not proven to be effective few-shot information extractors in general. In this paper, we propose an approach called Boundary-Aware LLMs for Few-Shot Named Entity Recognition to address these issues. We introduce a boundary-aware contrastive learning strategy to enhance the LLM's ability to perceive entity boundaries for generalized entity spans. Additionally, we utilize LoRAHub to align information from the target domain to the source domain, thereby enhancing adaptive cross-domain classification capabilities. Extensive experiments across various benchmarks demonstrate that our framework outperforms prior methods, validating its effectiveness. In particular, the proposed strategies demonstrate effectiveness across a range of LLM architectures. The code and data are released on https://github.com/UESTC-GQJ/BANER.

GerPS-Compare: Comparing NER methods for legal norm analysis

We apply NER to a particular sub-genre of legal texts in German: the genre of legal norms regulating administrative processes in public service administration. The analysis of such texts involves identifying stretches of text that instantiate one of ten classes identified by public service administration professionals. We investigate and compare three methods for performing Named Entity Recognition (NER) to detect these classes: a Rule-based system, deep discriminative models, and a deep generative model. Our results show that Deep Discriminative models outperform both the Rule-based system as well as the Deep Generative model, the latter two roughly performing equally well, outperforming each other in different classes. The main cause for this somewhat surprising result is arguably the fact that the classes used in the analysis are semantically and syntactically heterogeneous, in contrast to the classes used in more standard NER tasks. Deep Discriminative models appear to be better equipped for dealing with this heterogenerity than both generic LLMs and human linguists designing rule-based NER systems.

A Brief History of Named Entity Recognition

A large amount of information in today's world is now stored in knowledge bases. Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a process of extracting, disambiguation, and linking an entity from raw text to insightful and structured knowledge bases. More concretely, it is identifying and classifying entities in the text that are crucial for Information Extraction, Semantic Annotation, Question Answering, Ontology Population, and so on. The process of NER has evolved in the last three decades since it first appeared in 1996. In this survey, we study the evolution of techniques employed for NER and compare the results, starting from supervised to the developing unsupervised learning methods.

Extracting Information in a Low-resource Setting: Case Study on Bioinformatics Workflows

Bioinformatics workflows are essential for complex biological data analyses and are often described in scientific articles with source code in public repositories. Extracting detailed workflow information from articles can improve accessibility and reusability but is hindered by limited annotated corpora. To address this, we framed the problem as a low-resource extraction task and tested four strategies: 1) creating a tailored annotated corpus, 2) few-shot named-entity recognition (NER) with an autoregressive language model, 3) NER using masked language models with existing and new corpora, and 4) integrating workflow knowledge into NER models. Using BioToFlow, a new corpus of 52 articles annotated with 16 entities, a SciBERT-based NER model achieved a 70.4 F-measure, comparable to inter-annotator agreement. While knowledge integration improved performance for specific entities, it was less effective across the entire information schema. Our results demonstrate that high-performance information extraction for bioinformatics workflows is achievable.

RITA: Automatic Framework for Designing of Resilient IoT Applications

Designing resilient Internet of Things (IoT) systems requires i) identification of IoT Critical Objects (ICOs) such as services, devices, and resources, ii) threat analysis, and iii) mitigation strategy selection. However, the traditional process for designing resilient IoT systems is still manual, leading to inefficiencies and increased risks. In addition, while tools such as ChatGPT could support this manual and highly error-prone process, their use raises concerns over data privacy, inconsistent outputs, and internet dependence. Therefore, we propose RITA, an automated, open-source framework that uses a fine-tuned RoBERTa-based Named Entity Recognition (NER) model to identify ICOs from IoT requirement documents, correlate threats, and recommend countermeasures. RITA operates entirely offline and can be deployed on-site, safeguarding sensitive information and delivering consistent outputs that enhance standardization. In our empirical evaluation, RITA outperformed ChatGPT in four of seven ICO categories, particularly in actuator, sensor, network resource, and service identification, using both human-annotated and ChatGPT-generated test data. These findings indicate that RITA can improve resilient IoT design by effectively supporting key security operations, offering a practical solution for developing robust IoT architectures.