arXiv AI

A Scalable Framework for Automated NER Annotation Correction in Low-Resource Languages

The paper introduces a scalable, multi-step framework designed to improve the quality of Named Entity Recognition (NER) annotations, particularly in low-resource languages. It employs a frequency-based iterative approach that combines self‑training with a dual‑threshold mechanism to increase inference confidence. Experiments on various NER datasets show notable performance gains over the original data, and the study also investigates the use of generative Large Language Models for NER tasks.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

Error-Type-Aware Loss Reweighting for Robust Named Entity Recognition with Noisy LLM Labels

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to annotate datasets for training smaller, task‑specialized models such as named entity recognition (NER). However, current fine‑tuning processes ignore the annotation noise introduced by LLMs, leading to degraded performance, and existing noise‑robust losses fail to handle the heterogeneous nature of NER noise (e.g., missing mentions vs. type errors). The authors propose error‑type‑aware loss reweighting, which applies separate reweighting rules for different erroneous token types, improving F1 scores by 0.8–2.0 percentage points on average and up to 4.6 points on Wikigold at 24.1% noise.

By Elena Merdjanovska, Jonas Golde, Alan Akbik
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 12

Assessment of Generative Named Entity Recognition in the Era of Large Language Models

The paper evaluates open‑source large language models (LLMs) for both flat and nested named entity recognition (NER) tasks, comparing them to traditional encoder‑based models and decoder‑based LLMs using in‑context learning. It shows that with parameter‑efficient fine‑tuning and structured output formats (e.g., inline brackets or XML), LLMs can match or exceed the performance of conventional NER systems, and that their NER abilities arise from instruction following rather than memorization. Additionally, fine‑tuning for NER minimally affects, and can even improve, the LLMs’ general capabilities on other benchmarks.

By Qi Zhan, Yile Wang, Hui Huang
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

Generative vs. Encoder Models for Multilingual NER: A Comprehensive Empirical Study on Naamapadam

The paper compares generative and encoder-based neural models for multilingual Named Entity Recognition (NER) across the eleven languages of the Naamapadam benchmark. Five classic model families, four decoder-only large language models fine‑tuned with LoRA and 4‑bit NF4 quantisation, and nine generative models in zero‑to‑5‑shot inference were evaluated under strict CoNLL span‑level metrics. Encoder-based models (mBERT and XLM‑R) achieved substantially higher F1 scores—up to 0.675 on Hindi—than any generative architecture, with gaps of 7.5–40 percentage points; the best few‑shot result reached only 28% of the encoder baseline. The study identifies three language clusters (encoder‑dominant, partial‑coverage, and failure‑zone) and offers deployment guidelines based on transfer learning and low‑resource NLP principles.

By Jakkala Mahesh, Jatavath Shravan Kumar, Komalla Shivani, Sujoy Sarkar
arXiv AI
Sep 2

Is Human Annotation Necessary? Iterative MBR Distillation for Error Span Detection in Machine Translation

The paper introduces Iterative MBR Distillation for Error Span Detection (ESD) in machine translation, a self‑evolution framework that replaces human annotations with pseudo‑labels generated by a large language model. By iteratively applying Minimum Bayes Risk decoding, the method produces high‑quality error spans without costly human effort. Experiments on WMT Metrics Shared Task datasets show that models trained solely on these pseudo‑labels outperform both unadapted baselines and supervised models trained on human data at system and span levels, while keeping sentence‑level performance competitive.

By Boxuan Lyu, Haiyue Song, Zhi Qu
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 25

Language Specificity vs. Domain Diversity: Benchmarking Transformers for Bangla Medical NER

This study benchmarks transformer models for Bangla medical named entity recognition (NER), comparing BanglaBERT, multilingual BERT (mBERT), XLM‑RoBERTa, and GPT‑4o mini under zero‑shot and few‑shot prompting. Across a full test set of 3,179 samples, fine‑tuned XLM‑RoBERTa achieves a new state‑of‑the‑art F1‑score of 0.5959, while BanglaBERT lags with 0.4937, suggesting that domain diversity outweighs language specificity. The analysis shows high performance on Medicine and Specialist entities (F1 > 0.83) but lower accuracy on Symptoms (F1 0.4367), and demonstrates that fine‑tuned transformers outperform prompt‑only approaches by a factor of 3.76.

By Rakib Abdullah, Md. Maruful Islam Maruf