Zero-Resource Cross-Lingual Named Entity Recognition
About
Recently, neural methods have achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) results in Named Entity Recognition (NER) tasks for many languages without the need for manually crafted features. However, these models still require manually annotated training data, which is not available for many languages. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised cross-lingual NER model that can transfer NER knowledge from one language to another in a completely unsupervised way without relying on any bilingual dictionary or parallel data. Our model achieves this through word-level adversarial learning and augmented fine-tuning with parameter sharing and feature augmentation. Experiments on five different languages demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, outperforming existing models by a good margin and setting a new SOTA for each language pair.
Related benchmarks
| Task | Dataset | Result | Rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Named Entity Recognition | CoNLL Spanish NER 2002 (test) | F1 Score75.93 | 98 | |
| Named Entity Recognition | CoNLL Dutch 2002 (test) | F1 Score74.61 | 87 | |
| Named Entity Recognition | CoNLL German 2003 (test) | F1 Score65.24 | 78 | |
| Named Entity Recognition | CoNLL NER 2002/2003 (test) | German F1 Score65.24 | 59 | |
| Named Entity Recognition | Spanish (test) | -- | 15 | |
| Named Entity Recognition | Dutch (test) | -- | 15 | |
| Named Entity Recognition | English-to-Spanish en-es | F1 Score75.93 | 12 | |
| Named Entity Recognition | English-to-Dutch en-nl | F1 Score74.61 | 12 | |
| Named Entity Recognition | English-to-German en-de | F1 Score65.24 | 12 | |
| Named Entity Recognition | CoNLL de 2003 (test) | F1 Score65.24 | 12 |