Attending to Entity Class Attributes for Named Entity Recognition with Few-Shot Learning

Named Entity Recognition (NER) serves as the foundation for several natural language applications like question answering, chatbots and intent classification. Identification of entity boundaries and its categorization into entity types poses a significant challenge in domain-dependent and low-resource settings, with limited training data availability. To this end, we propose AtEnA, a novel NER framework utilizing entity class attributes from external knowledge source for few-shot learning. We use a two-stage fine-tuning process, wherein a language model is initially trained to “attend” to the different entity class attributes along with the textual context, and is then fine-tuned for the downstream application data with few annotated training examples. Experiments on benchmark NER datasets depict AtEnA to perform around 10 F1 score points better than the existing NER methodologies, specifically for few-shot limited training scenarios.