A novel prompting method for few-shot NER via LLMs

In various natural language processing tasks, significant strides have been made by Large Language Models (LLMs). Researchers leverage prompt method to conduct LLMs in accomplishing specific tasks under few-shot conditions. However, the prevalent use of LLMs’ prompt methods mainly focuses on guiding generative tasks, and employing existing prompts may result in poor performance in Named Entity Recognition (NER) tasks. To tackle this challenge, we propose a novel prompting method for few-shot NER. By enhancing existing prompt methods, we devise a standardized prompts tailored for the utilization of LLMs in NER tasks. Specifically, we structure the prompts into three components: task definition, few-shot demonstration, and output format. The task definition conducts LLMs in performing NER tasks, few-shot demonstration assists LLMs in understanding NER task objectives through specific output demonstration, and output format restricts LLMs’ output to prevent the generation of unnecessary results. The content of these components has been specifically tailored for NER tasks. Moreover, for the few-shot demonstration within the prompts, we propose a selection strategy that utilizes feedback from LLMs’ outputs to identify more suitable few-shot demonstration as prompts. Additionally, to enhance entity recognition performance, we enrich the prompts by summarizing error examples from the output process of LLMs and integrating them as additional prompts.