2021/09/15 by Sarkar Snigdha Sarathi Das, Arzoo Katiyar, Das, Sarkar Snigdha Sarathi +5
Computer Science · #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Natural Language Processing Techniques #Text and Document Classification Technologies #Topic Modeling
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2109.07589
openalex publication_date 2021/09/15 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Named Entity Recognition (NER) in Few-Shot setting is imperative for entity tagging in low resource domains. Existing approaches only learn class-specific semantic features and intermediate representations from source domains. This affects generalizability to unseen target domains, resulting in suboptimal performances. To this end, we present CONTaiNER, a novel contrastive learning technique that optimizes the inter-token distribution distance for Few-Shot NER. Instead of optimizing class-specific attributes, CONTaiNER optimizes a generalized objective of differentiating between token categories based on their Gaussian-distributed embeddings. This effectively alleviates overfitting issues originating from training domains. Our experiments in several traditional test domains (OntoNotes, CoNLL'03, WNUT '17, GUM) and a new large scale Few-Shot NER dataset (Few-NERD) demonstrate that on average, CONTaiNER outperforms previous methods by 3%-13% absolute F1 points while showing consistent performance trends, even in challenging scenarios where previous approaches could not achieve appreciable performance.