Few-Shot Named Entity Recognition via Meta-Learning

Few-shot learning under the N -way K -shot setting (i. e. , K annotated samples for each of N classes) has been widely studied in relation extraction (e. g. , FewRel) and image classification (e. g. , Mini-ImageNet). Named entity recognition (NER) is typically framed as a sequence labeling problem where the entity classes are inherently entangled together because the entity number and classes in a sentence are not known in advance, leaving the N -way K -shot NER problem so far unexplored. In this paper, we first formally define a more suitable N -way K -shot setting for NER. Then we propose FewNER, a novel meta-learning approach for few-shot NER. FewNER separates the entire network into a task-independent part and a task-specific part. During training in FewNER, the task-independent part is meta-learned across multiple tasks and the task-specific part is learned for each individual task in a low-dimensional space. At test time, FewNER keeps the task-independent part fixed and adapts to a new task via gradient descent by updating only the task-specific part, resulting in it being less prone to overfitting and more computationally efficient. Compared with pre-trained language models (e. g. , BERT and ELMo) which obtain the transferability in an implicit manner (i. e. , relying on large-scale corpora), FewNER explicitly optimizes the capability of “learning to adapt quickly” through meta-learning. The results demonstrate that FewNER achieves state-of-the-art performance against nine baseline methods by significant margins on three adaptation experiments (i. e. , intra-domain cross-type, cross-domain intra-type and cross-domain cross-type).