Learning Robust Named Entity Recognizers From Noisy Data With Retrieval Augmentation
<|reference_start|>Learning Robust Named Entity Recognizers From Noisy Data With Retrieval Augmentation: Named entity recognition (NER) models often struggle with noisy inputs, such as those with spelling mistakes or errors generated by Optical Character Recognition processes, and learning a robust NER model is challenging. Existing robust NER models utilize both noisy text and its corresponding gold text for training, which is infeasible in many real-world applications in which gold text is not available. In this paper, we consider a more realistic setting in which only noisy text and its NER labels are available. We propose to retrieve relevant text of the noisy text from a knowledge corpus and use it to enhance the representation of the original noisy input. We design three retrieval methods: sparse retrieval based on lexicon similarity, dense retrieval based on semantic similarity, and self-retrieval based on task-specific text. After retrieving relevant text, we concatenate the retrieved text with the original noisy text and encode them with a transformer network, utilizing self-attention to enhance the contextual token representations of the noisy text using the retrieved text. We further employ a multi-view training framework that improves robust NER without retrieving text during inference. Experiments show that our retrieval-augmented model achieves significant improvements in various noisy NER settings.<|reference_end|>
@article{ai2024learning,
    title={Learning Robust Named Entity Recognizers From Noisy Data With Retrieval
  Augmentation},
    author={Chaoyi Ai, Yong Jiang, Shen Huang, Pengjun Xie, Kewei Tu},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.18562},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2407.18562},
    primaryClass={cs.CL cs.AI}
}