DFS-NER: Description Enhanced Few-shot NER via Prompt Learning and Meta-Learning

Abstract

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a very common task in many social good related domains. Recently, deep learning based NER has gradually matured, but still faces the scarcity problem of labeled data in specific domains. Therefore, researchers focus on few-shot NER to reduce the model’s data dependence and enhance the transferability of the model. However, existing works usually cannot adapt to new entity types and are prone to the so-called negative transfer problem. Therefore, in this paper we propose a type- Description-enhanced Few Shot NER model, called DFS-NER, which effectively integrates the prompt learning paradigm and the meta-learning framework. DFS-NER performs well under frozen pre-training model parameters through continuous templates. It realizes efficient source domain training and target domain parameter fine-tuning through the metalearning framework. We enhance the robustness of entity- type prototype representations by introducing word-word- level and word-type-level contrastive learning objectives and capsule networks as the induction module. Simultaneously, based on discrete prompt learning, a masked-language model learning objective guided by type description is proposed, which can well absorb the semantic information of entity types. Experiments on commonly used datasets, including, SNIPS, Few-NERD, and MIT Movie show that DFS-NER basically surpasses baseline models and achieves the state-of-the-art performance.