Machine Reading Comprehension Model in RuNNE Competition

The paper studies machine reading comprehension model (MRC) (Li et al., 2020) in its application to extracting nested named entities (nested NER) in the RuNNE-2022 evaluation (Artemova et al., 2022). The model transforms named entity recognition tasks to a question-answering task. In this paper we compare several approaches to formulating ”questions” for the MRC model such as entity type names (keywords), entity type definitions, most frequent examples for the train set, combinations of definitions and examples. We found that using two most frequent examples from the training set is comparable in quality of nested NER with gathering qualitative definitions from different dictionaries, which is much more complicated. In the RuNNE evaluation, the MRC model obtained the best results among models without any manual work (rules or additional manual annotation of texts).