An Enhanced Span-based Decomposition Method for Few-Shot Sequence Labeling

Few-Shot Sequence Labeling (FSSL) is a canonical paradigm for the tagging models, e.g., named entity recognition and slot filling, to generalize on an emerging, resource-scarce domain. Recently, the metric-based meta-learning framework has been recognized as a promising approach for FSSL. However, most prior works assign a label to each token based on the token-level similarities, which ignores the integrality of named entities or slots. To this end, in this paper, we propose ESD, an Enhanced Span-based Decomposition method for FSSL. ESD formulates FSSL as a span-level matching problem between test query and supporting instances. Specifically, ESD decomposes the span matching problem into a series of span-level procedures, mainly including enhanced span representation, class prototype aggregation and span conflicts resolution. Extensive experiments show that ESD achieves the new state-of-the-art results on two popular FSSL benchmarks, FewNERD and SNIPS, and is proven to be more robust in the nested and noisy tagging scenarios. Our code is available at https://github.com/Wangpeiyi9979/ESD.

PDF Abstract NAACL 2022 PDF NAACL 2022 Abstract

Datasets


Results from the Paper


Task Dataset Model Metric Name Metric Value Global Rank Result Benchmark
Few-shot NER Few-NERD (INTER) ESD 5 way 1~2 shot 59.29±1.25 # 6
5 way 5~10 shot 69.06±0.80 # 6
10 way 1~2 shot 52.16±0.79 # 7
10 way 5~10 shot 64.00±0.43 # 6
Few-shot NER Few-NERD (INTRA) ESD 5 way 1~2 shot 36.08±1.60 # 8
5 way 5~10 shot 52.14±1.50 # 8
10 way 1~2 shot 30.00±0.70 # 8
10 way 5~10 shot 42.15±2.60 # 8

Methods