Named Entity Recognition

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promising potential for biomedical named entity recognition (BioNER) through instruction following and in-context learning. However, existing LLM-based BioNER methods still face two key limitations. First, retrieved demonstrations and external biomedical knowledge provide limited support for dataset-specific annotation semantics, leaving entity boundaries, type scopes, and annotation conventions ambiguous. Second, free-form generation lacks sufficient structural control, often leading to invalid formats, hallucinated mentions, duplicated entities, and boundary errors. To address these limitations, we propose GAMA, a guideline-augmented multi-agent framework for schema-as-code BioNER. GAMA first induces candidate annotation rules from labeled training instances and verifies them against annotated data to construct reliable dataset-specific guideline memory. Guided by these verified rules, a planning component generates ranked span-type hypotheses with rationales, and a coding component converts them into schema-constrained entity objects. A verification module then checks span grounding, type validity, and structural compliance, and performs dual-loop refinement to correct invalid or low-confidence predictions. Experiments on five widely used BioNER datasets with multiple LLM backbones show that GAMA consistently outperforms strong LLM-based baselines. Ablation and parameter analyses further verify the effectiveness of the proposed components.

Privacy redaction must remove personal information while preserving relationships expressed in text. We develop a multilingual named-entity tagger with fine-grained distinctions supporting varied redaction policies and methods for cheaply learning additional distinctions. We fine-tune a multilingual encoder with an affine span-tagging head on frontier-model annotations in 35 languages, replay mapped human gold with coverage-aware masking so unannotated types are not treated as negatives, and repair subword boundaries with a learned +/-1-character adjustment. On 1,283 human-gold test segments in seven languages, best measured redaction F1 is 88.8, against 69.1 for published GLiNER2 with 11 unrepresentable types excluded from its task (68.8 without that exemption), 67.8 for GLiNER2 adapted to the new training data, 57.3 for Microsoft Presidio and 35.8 for the best published OpenAI Privacy Filter fine-tune. Adding about 50,000 annotated training sentences and increasing human-gold replay improves exact typed-span F1 from 74.5 to 76.3 on Ont3, our 31-type frontier-annotated NER evaluation of 1,201 development segments. Mapped-gold replay alone raises human-gold F1 by ten points without loss on frontier-annotated text; boundary adjustment adds 1.7 exact typed-span F1 points on Ont3. Local LLMs fitting on a single 96-GB GPU underperformed as prompted annotators and frozen encoders, with encoding 30-95 times slower than XLM-R inference and prompted annotation roughly 180-1,100 times slower in the evaluated configurations. The encoder architecture delivers 4.9 times GLiNER2's CPU throughput. We release code, prompts and training recipes, with data-acquisition scripts and source links.

Cross-lingual zero-shot transfer and multilingual fine-tuning are promising approaches for NLP tasks such as Named Entity Recognition (NER) in low-resource languages, but in the absence of target language benchmarks, it is unclear which auxiliary language selection strategy leads to the best transfer. We introduce RunyaNER, the first publicly available NER benchmark for the East African language Runyankore, and use it to investigate the choice of which languages to use for transfer. Created with a semi-automated pipeline and fully manually verified, RunyaNER contains over 237k annotated words across 30k sentences. We benchmark pretrained models on RunyaNER, establishing that our dataset is of sufficient quality and size to produce effective Runyankore NER models. We then use RunyaNER to investigate auxiliary language selection in cross-lingual zero-shot and multilingual fine-tuning settings. Our experiments show that while transfer performance is highly sensitive to auxiliary language selection, embedding-based measures computed from labelled training spans correlate more strongly with downstream transfer performance than traditional linguistic features based on metadata or typology. By releasing RunyaNER and providing a systematic analysis of auxiliary language selection strategies, this work contributes both a new benchmark resource and practical insights for multilingual transfer in low-resource settings.

Medical Named Entity Recognition (NER) for low-resource languages remains a challenging task due to high linguistic variability and a scarcity of domain-specific annotated corpora. This work presents a comprehensive empirical benchmark evaluating three fine-tuned transformer encoders-BanglaBERT, multilingual BERT (mBERT), and XLM-RoBERTa-against GPT-4o mini under zero-shot and few-shot prompting configurations for Bangla medical NER. In contrast to prior studies that evaluated large language models on limited subsets of only 50 samples, we conduct a large-scale evaluation across the full test set of 3,179 samples, providing statistically robust and reproducible baselines. Our fine-tuned XLM-RoBERTa model achieves an F1- score of 0.5959, establishing a new state-of-the-art and surpassing the previously reported best result of 0.5848. Crucially, we demonstrate that the language-specific BanglaBERT model consistently underperforms its multilingual counterparts with an F1-score of 0.4937, indicating that pretraining domain diversity can outweigh language specificity in highly specialized clinical settings. Furthermore, we present a detailed per-entity-type analysis for this task, revealing that Medicine and Specialist categories are recognized with high reliability, achieving F1- scores above 0.83, while the Symptom category remains the most challenging with an F1-score of 0.4367 despite being the most frequent training class. Finally, fine-tuned transformer models outperform the optimal prompting configuration by a factor of 3.76, confirming that prompt-only pipelines remain inadequate for structured clinical entity extraction in low-resource language environments.

How should natural language processing models be selected and adapted for global health literature in environments where annotated data and computational resources are limited? This thesis investigates these challenges through experiments on semantic tag discovery, named entity recognition (NER), and multi-label topic classification. First, skip-gram word2vec models trained on progressively larger specialized corpora are compared with BioWordVec to assess how corpus size and domain context influence tag discovery. Vocabulary coverage and qualitative evaluation indicate that broader coverage does not necessarily yield more useful domain-specific associations. The analysis then turns to entity extraction, comparing convolutional spaCy models with a RoBERTa-based transformer on 1,000 annotated sentences. Under a lenient scoring protocol, the transformer achieves 0.80 micro-F1 versus 0.65-0.69 for convolutional models, but takes 82 seconds rather than 5-6 seconds. This trade-off motivates fine-tuning convolutional models and integrating a disease recognizer that achieves 81.33% test F1 on the NCBI Disease Corpus. Combined with PDF preprocessing, entity filtering, and MeSH enrichment, the resulting pipeline supports document-level indexing. To complement entity extraction with thematic annotation, MiniLM-based few-shot classification is compared with BART-MNLI zero-shot inference across 50 topics and 1,000 handcrafted test sentences. BART-MNLI achieves 95.2% single-label accuracy versus 59%; reported multi-label accuracies are 88% and 32% under partly manual assessment. However, its higher inference cost limits practical integration. The results show where domain specialization and lightweight adaptation offer practical value, and where transformer accuracy justifies higher inference costs, providing an empirical basis for building knowledge systems under resource constraints.

In-context learning (ICL) based on large language models (LLMs) has shown promising potential in alleviating performance bottlenecks caused by the limited availability of annotated data in Named Entity Recognition (NER). However, existing methods still face issues of retrieval misalignment and generation uncertainty, making their performance heavily dependent on the LLM's capabilities. As the parameter scale of LLMs decreases, their performance in few-shot settings deteriorates significantly. In this paper, we propose a novel unified retrieval-augmented framework, URA-NER, including three key components: Progressive Granularity Retrieval (PGR), Model-aware Representation Enhancement (MaRE), and Reason-aware Knowledge Verification. PGR is a two-stage retrieval mechanism that achieves stage alignment. It first retrieves demonstrations for span detection based on the query's global semantics, and then for type classification based on the specific entity context, providing fine-grained local information. Moreover, MaRE employs entity pre-recognition to guide the construction of representations, ensuring the query and demonstrations are aligned within the LLM's semantic space and attention pattern. In addition, to mitigate generation uncertainty, we propose RaKV, a closed-loop "generation-retrieval-verification" process. It explicates the LLM's reasoning paths, leverages them for the retrieval of external knowledge, and reorganizes the knowledge into verification evidence aligned with the original reasoning paths. We conduct extensive experiments on multiple low-resource NER datasets. Results demonstrate that URA-NER significantly enhances the performance of LLMs under low-resource settings, with particularly pronounced gains for smaller LLMs, achieving new state-of-the-art results on several benchmarks.

Cross-domain Named Entity Recognition (CD-NER) aims to transfer the rich knowledge in the source domain to the target domain. Recent studies adopting decomposition or generation paradigms have achieved significant performance improvements, demonstrating high accuracy in entity span detection. However, during entity type classification, models severely suffer from entity type confusion, the erroneous tendency that models classify entities of one type in the text as another similar but incorrect type. To address this issue, we first propose a Multidimensional Confusion Quantification Model (MCQM) that quantifies a model's confusion extent between entity types from three dimensions: source-target hierarchy analysis, semantic similarity analysis, and explicit data evaluation. Moreover, we propose the Progressive Bidirectional Reasoning Chain (PBRC). PBRC leverages the source-target hierarchy and confusion analysis from the MCQM to prompt the LLM to generate two-stage reasoning information. The two-stage reasoning information is utilized to augment the knowledge of the model, significantly mitigating entity type confusion and improving the model's generalization performance. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves new state-of-the-art results on all domains of the CrossNER dataset.

Poor quality or noisy annotations in Named Entity Recognition (NER), as in any other NLP task, make it challenging to achieve state-of-the-art performance. In this paper, we present a multi-step framework to enhance the annotation quality of NER datasets by employing automated techniques. We propose a frequency-based iterative approach that leverages self-training and a dual-threshold mechanism to enhance inference confidence. Experimental evaluations on different NER datasets demonstrate significant improvements in NER performance with respect to the original datasets. This work further explores the potential of generative Large Language Models (LLMs) to perform NER for low-resource languages.

Rapid extraction of structured information from social media is important for humanitarian response, yet existing disaster tweet resources mainly provide document-level category labels without span-level entity annotations. We introduce HUMAID-NER, the first named entity recognition dataset built on the HumAID benchmark, containing 60,000 English disaster tweets annotated in BIO format across ten operationally motivated entity types and yielding approximately 175,000 labelled entity spans. Annotations are generated through a reproducible three-stage hybrid pipeline combining a spaCy transformer model, disaster-domain EntityRuler patterns, and structured regular expressions with priority-based overlap resolution. We also propose a joint multitask learning framework that performs disaster-specific named entity recognition and humanitarian event classification using a shared RoBERTa-large encoder. To reduce task conflict during joint training, the model uses homoscedastic uncertainty weighting with learnable task parameters and a two-stage training schedule that freezes the lower 18 of 24 encoder layers in the second stage. On the HUMAID-NER validation set, the proposed system achieves NER span micro-F1 of 0.841 and classification macro-F1 of 0.761 simultaneously. A real-time web dashboard demonstrates end-to-end deployment. The dataset, models, and pipeline code are released to support reproducibility and future crisis informatics research.

Political debates are often analyzed through Argument Mining (AM) to investigate the key arguments that drive them. However, political arguments are rarely interpretable from argumentative spans alone, as claims and premises generally depend on the entities (e.g., people, events, locations, parties) they mention. Existing AM resources and methods typically annotate argumentative spans and roles, but do not provide a paired debate-entity layer for asking which Debate Named Entities (DNE), e.g., actors and events, are invoked within debates. In this work, we address these data and methodological gaps by (i) introducing DNE-ElecDeb, an entity-enriched version of the USElecDeb dataset that adds DNEs in both argumentative and non-argumentative spans and defines Debate Named Entity Recognition (DNER) as the task of detecting DNEs, and (ii) proposing Joint Argument and Entity Tagging (JAET), a generative framework that fine-tunes decoder-only LLMs to insert inline argument and entity tags into debate turns while preserving the original transcript. Under BIO-tagging evaluation, JAET improves relative F1 on the joint AM+DNER task by +27.3%, resp. +41.9%, under the untyped, resp. typed setting over the strongest sequential AM-DNER pipelines, demonstrating that such gains cannot be recovered by composing two independent modules. Notably, similar margins replicate on Persuasive Essays (+26.6%, resp. +52.7%), showing effective generalization to domains orthogonal to political debates. By unifying argumentative and entity-level representations within a single view, our contributions pave the way for richer political debates understanding.

Radiology reports are written primarily for clinicians, and their specialized terminology often makes them difficult for patients to interpret. As a result, many patients turn to publicly available Large Language Models (LLMs) to help explain their reports, despite well-documented risks of factual inaccuracies and hallucinations. Automated lay-summary generation has emerged as a promising alternative, yet the effectiveness of retrieval-enhanced and clinically informed approaches for radiology-specific communication remains underexplored. This study investigates the extent to which Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and Named Entity Recognition (NER) improve the quality, factual consistency, and readability of automatically generated lay summaries compared with standard LLM-based generation. We develop a framework combining NER-based extraction of clinically relevant findings with a RAG mechanism for contextual grounding, evaluated across few-shot and fine-tuned variants of two models (Qwen, BioBART). Results show that NER consistently improves readability and overall quality, while RAG alone offers no benefit and can introduce hallucinations from irrelevant retrieved terms. Combining RAG with NER degrades performance in few-shot settings but improves readability when fine-tuned. Fine-tuned BioBART with NER achieves the best overall performance, highlighting entity-aware extraction as the primary driver of improved patient-friendly summaries.

Named Entity Recognition (NER) has achieved substantial progress since the advent of large language models (LLMs). Nevertheless, the recognition of long-tail and domain-specific entities remains challenging due to the deficiency in parametric knowledge. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) offers a promising remedy by injecting external knowledge, but it also introduces noise and unnecessary cost when dealing with familiar cases. In this paper, we propose NE-R1, a novel framework for adaptive retrieval-augmented NER. We design a "retrieval-on-demand" mechanism for NER. Then we integrate it into models by a two-stage training method: (1) multi-task instruction tuning initialization; (2) end-to-end RL optimization with CoT. To achieve reasonable selection between parameterized and external knowledge, we design a multi-dimensional reward considering both accuracy and retrieval benefit. NE-R1 achieves state-of-the-art performance on various benchmarks, with an average F1 score gain of 2.52% in in-domain evaluation and 1.18% in zero-shot cross-domain evaluation.

We target practical anonymization of Persian customer chats by training a compact NER model from LLM-labeled supervision and selecting the best labeler for deployment. We compare three instruction-tuned LLMs: DeepSeek-V3-0324, GPT-OSS-120B, and Qwen3-235B-A22B-Instruct-2507, to produce span annotations under a shared JSON protocol, yielding four corpora (OSS_ZeroShot, Qwen_ZeroShot, Qwen_FewShot, DeepSeek_FewShot). A MatinaRoberta-based token-classifier is trained per corpus and evaluated with token-level Precision/Recall/F1 (overall and per-class). We also report Label Coverage Recall (LCR), the proportion of gold non-O tokens predicted as non-O, and quantify cross-labeler behavior via a token-level Venn on test annotations. Finally, we contrast test-set annotation latency of the LLMs on H200 nodes with the trained NER's test-time labeling on a single RTX 3090. Results show that supervision from OSS_ZeroShot yields the strongest macro-F1 and LCR, while the resulting NER labels an entire 40K-message test set in approximately 2 minutes on one consumer GPU. This establishes a practical path to high-quality, low-cost anonymization for Persian industrial data.

The exponential growth of scientific publications calls for automatic Information Extraction (IE) systems to support knowledge discovery. In this context, the GutBrainIE benchmark evaluates Named Entity Recognition (NER), Named Entity Recognition and Disambiguation (NERD), and Relation Extraction (RE) systems in the gut-brain axis domain. We propose Two-stage Workflow for Information eXtraction (TWIX), an end-to-end IE pipeline featuring three interconnected modules, each leveraging a two-stage framework to solve all four GutBrainIE subtasks. Evaluation on the development and test sets shows that our method substantially outperforms the baseline by a wide margin, while also ranking first among all participant submissions across all subtasks. These results indicate that the proposed two-stage pipeline effectively improves both precision and recall in practical settings.

Incremental Named Entity Recognition (INER) stands as a pivotal task in information extraction, emphasizing the successive identification of new entity types within unstructured text. Faced with the continuous influx of entity types, INER grapples with two significant challenges: the widespread issue of catastrophic forgetting and the unique shift issue of the non-entity type semantics. While pseudo-labeling-based INER methods have proven effective in addressing these challenges, a previously overlooked issue arises: the biased context problem. Our analysis shows that, in new sentences, the contextual associations of tokens representing old entity types exhibit a significantly stronger bias towards new entity types compared to their contexts in old sentences. This tendency intensifies the degradation of old knowledge while promoting the overfitting of new knowledge. To solve this biased context, we propose a Type-Balanced Contextual Learning (TBCL) method, featuring a sentence-duplet learning scheme and a contextual consistency loss. This approach offers a fresh perspective for INER through context analysis. Extensive experiments across ten INER settings on three highly recognized datasets showcase the efficacy of our TBCL method, highlighting its proficiency in resolving the biased context issue inherent in pseudo-labeling based INER approaches.

Large language models are increasingly used to annotate datasets for training smaller, task-specialized models such as named entity recognition. While this method yields effective models, it assumes that the synthetic dataset is correctly annotated. In this work, we find that (i) current fine-tuning processes simply ignore LLM-introduced annotation noise, resulting in degraded performance and (ii) existing noise-robust losses are not transferable to sequence labeling because annotation noise in named entity recognition is heterogeneous: for example, missing mentions and type errors affect the training signal in different ways. Treating all noisy tokens equally in noise-robust losses and applying a single reweighing criterion for all may therefore remove useful supervision or reinforce incorrect labels. To address this limitation, we propose error-type-aware loss reweighting for NER, which introduces separate reweighing rules for different types of potentially erroneous tokens. Our approach is simple and efficient, does not require additional training resources, and improves F1 by 0.8 - 2.0 percentage points on dataset-level average for noise levels between 15% and 40%, with a maximum improvement of 4.6 percentage points with 24.1% noise on Wikigold.

Language is humanity's most consequential technology, yet for over a billion speakers across India's twenty-two constitutionally recognised languages, its digital layer remains structurally incomplete. Named Entity Recognition (NER), the foundational step in transforming raw text into machine-interpretable knowledge, has been studied exhaustively for English but remains largely unsolved across most Indic languages. This paper presents a rigorous comparative study of generative and encoder-based neural architectures for NER on all eleven languages of the Naamapadam benchmark. We evaluate five classic model families spanning sequence-to-sequence transformers and multilingual encoders; four decoder-only large language models (LLMs) fine-tuned with LoRA and 4-bit NF4 quantisation; and nine generative models in zero-to-5-shot inference. Under strict CoNLL span-level evaluation, encoder-based models (mBERT and XLM-R, both F1=0.675 on Hindi) substantially outperform every generative architecture in ten of eleven languages, with gaps of 7.5-40 percentage points against the strongest competitor (Gemma-2-2B: avg F1=0.427). The best few-shot result reaches only 28% of the encoder baseline. We identify three language clusters--encoder-dominant, partial-coverage, and failure-zone; and provide actionable deployment guidelines grounded in transfer learning and low-resource NLP principles.

Biomedical Named Entity Recognition (NER) is fundamental to healthcare AI applications, including clinical decision support and medical information extraction. While corpora with Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) annotations, such as MedMentions, have driven progress in English biomedical NER, no comparable resource exists for Vietnamese. This paper presents En-ViMedNER, the first English-Vietnamese parallel biomedical NER corpus annotated with UMLS semantic types, which are language-neutral codes providing a shared cross-lingual label space and ensuring direct comparability with existing UMLS-based resources. The corpus contains 4,392 PubMed abstract pairs, 44,892 English-Vietnamese sentence pairs, and 202,949 aligned entity-mention pairs across 21 semantic types adapted from the MedMentions ST21pv dataset. To balance quality and scalability, we have constructed the corpus through automatic translation, expert post-editing, LLM-assisted label projection, and human verification and adjudication. We characterize En-ViMedNER as a large-scale silver-standard corpus with a human-audited and consensus-corrected mini-test subset. We evaluate En-ViMedNER in two settings: (i) Vietnamese-input/Vietnamese-output biomedical NER and (ii) English-input/Vietnamese-output cross-lingual NER. For Vietnamese NER, we benchmark Vietnamese-supervised encoder models, English-supervised multilingual encoder models, and prompt-based LLMs. The best model achieves an F1 score of 52.70 on the test set and 53.78 on the mini-test set. For cross-lingual NER, we benchmark encoder-decoder models and prompt-based LLMs. The best model achieves an F1 score of 45.44 on the mini-test set. We publicly release our corpus, corpus construction pipeline, and baseline models to facilitate future Vietnamese biomedical NLP research.

Scientific named entity recognition (SciNER) plays a crucial role in information extraction and knowledge discovery from scientific texts. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated the capacity to achieve competitive SciNER performance with minimal human effort. Existing research highlights the importance of incorporating candidate entity type information for accurate entity recognition and classification by LLMs. However, when too many candidate entity types are provided in the prompt, LLMs struggle to accurately recognize and label entities in scientific texts, where entity types are more complex than in general domains. To address this challenge, we propose TdSciNER, a type-driven approach that effectively leverages entity type information to enhance SciNER performance. In TdSciNER, we first design an entity type filter model to identify the most likely entity types present in a given sentence. Subsequently, we introduce an auxiliary multi-class entity typing task within a multi-task learning framework alongside SciNER to obtain richer contextual representations. Then, we develop a novel demonstration selection strategy based on sentence similarity and entity type diversity to activate the in-context learning capabilities of LLMs, thereby improving entity recognition accuracy across diverse scientific domains. Experiments on three datasets demonstrate that our method achieves performance comparable to fully supervised models. Further analysis validates that each entity type-driven component in TdSciNER contributes to the improvement of SciNER performance. This work provides valuable insights for future advancements in SciNER and broader information extraction tasks in scientific text mining.

Named Entity Recognition (NER) for Gujarati remains underexplored, hindered by the absence of capitalization cues, rich morphology, lexical ambiguity, and free word order. Prior ensemble work has emphasized architectural diversity by combining heterogeneous classifiers, multilingual encoders, or classical sequence models, rather than exploiting language-aligned monolingual pretraining. This study asks whether, for a low-resource, morphologically rich language like Gujarati, a homogeneous ensemble of a single monolingual encoder outperforms such architectural diversity. We propose HomoEnsNER, a homogeneous ensemble of five independently fine-tuned GujaratiBERT models combined via majority voting, evaluated against a single GujaratiBERT baseline and six heterogeneous alternatives, including combinations with MuRIL-base, MuRIL-large, IndicBERT, mBERT, BiLSTM, CRF, and a stacked BiLSTM-CRF-GujaratiBERT architecture. All eight models were trained under a consistent budget and evaluated using entity-level F1 on the Naamapadam Gujarati test split. HomoEnsNER achieved the highest F1 (0.8442), surpassing the baseline (0.8347) and every heterogeneous alternative (lowest: 0.7855), indicating that language alignment is a more effective, budget-conscious ensembling strategy than architectural complexity for low-resource Indian language NER.

Multimodal named entity recognition (MNER) determines whether each candidate span and entity-type hypothesis is supported by joint textual and visual evidence. Existing imagine-and-compare verifiers map each (span, type) pair to one predicted visual feature, compressing diverse visual realisations into a single prototype and providing a compatibility score without explicit probabilistic semantics. We introduce DiffImaginE, which formulates MNER type verification as conditional latent diffusion inference. Given span-localised visual evidence, a type-conditioned denoiser predicts noise injected into its standardised latent. The resulting denoising error provides an ELBO-consistent surrogate for type-conditional negative log-likelihood, allowing competing type hypotheses to be ranked by how well they explain the observation. DiffImaginE retains a standard multimodal encoder stack and replaces the deterministic verifier with a classifier-free-guided diffusion scorer trained using Min-SNR weighting. We directly supervise per-type diffusion scores as classification logits, learn aggregation across noise levels, and use antithetic sampling to reduce Monte Carlo comparison variance. Our analysis shows that classifier-free guidance sharpens the induced type posterior and characterises when antithetic pairing reduces variance at equal denoiser cost. Experiments on Twitter-2015 and Twitter-2017 show consistent gains over a matched deterministic ImaginE control under the same encoder, auxiliary objectives, and evaluation protocol, supported by ablations and paired significance tests.

This paper explores the challenges and the methodologies associated with learning quality representations in scenarios with unlabelled small or limited datasets for downstream information extraction task (Multidomain Named Entity Recognition (NER). The study adopts a Transfer Learning on small datasets. Traditional NER systems often rely on large, labelled data, which is impractical for many domains. This study, therefore, applies an unsupervised pre-training approach to precondition and identify entities without annotated datasets, then applies transfer learning models to different simulated limited datasets for a named entity recognition task. Entity Recognition (NER) is essential in natural language processing (NLP), it identifies and classifies related entities within the text. This study addresses the complexities of domain variability, data sparsity, and overfitting and investigates innovative approaches such as data augmentation, few-shot learning, and domain adversarial training. Integrating these techniques promises to enhance the performance and generalizability of NER systems across diverse and resource-constrained domains, paving the way for more efficient and adaptable NLP applications.

Recent advancements of zero-shot Named Entity Recognition (NER) establish strong baselines by formulating sequence labeling into question answering where Large Language Models (LLMs) can be naturally adopted. However, existing LLM-based zero-shot NER methods suffer from the limitations of prompt and demonstration engineering. To address these issues with minimal human interventions, we introduce DE-NER, a dialogue elicitation framework which elicits the chatting ability of LLMs to fully extract the knowledge encoded in LLMs. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperform the competitive baselines in zero-shot settings across multiple benchmarks, with an average improvement of 3.75% F1 points. Codes are released in https://github.com/kkkenshi/DE-NER.

Named Entity Recognition (NER) for low-resource languages such as Marathi remains a challenging task due to limited annotated resources and linguistic complexity. Although recent Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance across a wide range of natural language processing tasks, their effectiveness for language-specific NER in low-resource settings remains uncertain. In this study, we fine-tune MahaBERT-v2 on different variants of the MahaNER dataset and systematically compare the performance of these models with an existing MahaNER baseline and prominent general-purpose LLMs, including Gemini, LLaMA-3.3-70B, and Gemma models. All models are evaluated on a Marathi NER test dataset using standard metrics of precision, recall, and F1-score. The experimental results show that the fine-tuned MahaBERT-based models consistently outperform both the baseline and all evaluated LLMs, with the fine-tuned models achieving F1-scores ranging from 0.88 to 0.91, surpassing the existing MahaNER model (0.8843) and significantly exceeding the performance of LLM-based approaches, whose F1-scores range from 0.57 to 0.69. These findings demonstrate that task-specific, language-focused models trained on domain-relevant data remain more effective than general-purpose LLMs for Marathi NER, highlighting the continued importance of specialized architectures for low-resource language processing.

Continual Learning for Named Entity Recognition (CLNER) enable models to incrementally learn new entity types without forgetting previously acquired ones. However, existing methods suffer from catastrophic forgetting and insufficient exploitation of shared information across tasks. This paper proposes FSE, a Fast-Slow Experts enhanced span-based NER model for CLNER. The shared fast expert learns token-level links to efficiently filter out unlikely spans, while the task-specific slow expert performs span classification only on the remaining candidates. It stabilizes learning by promoting knowledge sharing across tasks and maintains plasticity by reducing learning burden at each task. A length-decay negative sampling strategy to mitigate span imbalance is also introduced. Extensive experiments on OntoNotes and FewNERD synthestic datasets demonstrate that FSE achieves state-of-the-art performance in CLNER scenarios, with effectiveness of each component, empirical evidence of faster convergence and expected functionality of both experts.

We present CrimeNER Demo, an AI-powered platform that enables us to extract general crime-related information from documents and classify them into entity types with two levels of granularity. We provide pretrained NER models on the CrimeNER database, and we give the possibility to users to provide their own annotated data to train models for their own specific cases. This demonstrator aims to promote crime-related NER research and provides a practical tool to automatically extract crime information for researchers and law enforcement agencies. The demonstrator includes: i) Pretrained NER models on the crime domain; ii) Possibility to finetune the models on specific data annotated by the user; and iii) An automatic pipeline to extract and annotate crime entities from documents. The demo platform, a tutorial to run the demo, and a video demonstration are publicly available on GitHub.

Deploying large language models (LLMs) as personal assistants on mobile devices demands privacy, low latency, and offline availability, yet the computational cost of giant models clashes with strict edge-hardware budgets. We argue that this tension cannot be resolved by model compression alone; it requires decomposing on-device intelligence into complementary functional roles. We present SmartRAG, a fully on-device framework that organizes an intelligent assistant around four coordinated modules -- Perception, Memory, Focus, and Thinking. At the core of SmartRAG is EvoNER, a continually learnable named-entity recognizer that incrementally expands its label inventory through teacher-distilled updates, enabling the system to absorb previously unseen entity types without retraining the backbone LLM. Extracted knowledge is stored in MRGraph, a three-layer provenance-preserving knowledge graph, and retrieved at query time through a hybrid pipeline combining graph traversal, lexical matching, and dense semantic search. The on-device LLM is invoked only for high-value semantic operations -- labeling, planning, and answer synthesis -- keeping inference costs bounded. Experiments on four QA benchmarks (TriviaQA, Natural Questions, HotpotQA, MultiHopQA) show that SmartRAG with a quantized 1.7B-parameter backbone achieves multi-hop reasoning performance competitive with models up to 18$\times$ larger, while running entirely on commodity smartphones within practical memory and latency envelopes.

Identifying and assigning keywords at scale is a technical, practical, and ethical challenge for crowdsourced collections. This article reports the findings of the "Extracting Keywords from Crowdsourced Collections" project, which used the Their Finest Hour Online Archive, a crowdsourced Second World War digital collection hosted by the University of Oxford, as a case study. The project evaluated three Natural Language Processing approaches to automate keyword extraction: Named Entity Recognition, Keyword Extraction, and Topic Modelling. It tested these approaches across a range of artificial intelligence techniques, from traditional statistical methods to modern GenAI neural networks. Our quantitative and qualitative findings indicate that Natural Language Processing approaches offer real potential for keyword extraction at scale in crowdsourced collections, but that no single method offers a complete solution and that model choice significantly shapes results. We argue that in crowdsourced collections, where metadata is the direct product of engagement with living contributors, automated keyword extraction raises distinct stewardship responsibilities that must be addressed alongside technical performance. Open-weight, extractive models emerge from our evaluation as best placed to support responsible deployment, while generative AI, despite its abstractive potential, introduces accountability risks that anyone managing crowdsourced collections should weigh carefully.

Conspiracy theories commonly attribute important events to the actions of powerful and secretive actors. While computational research has largely focused on document-level analyses of conspiracy theories, less attention has been paid to identifying the actors that drive such narratives. We develop annotation guidelines for conspiratorial actors, present a span-annotated corpus of German Telegram posts, and investigate their automatic extraction using transformer-based models. We further apply the resulting model to the \textit{Schwurbelarchiv}, a large-scale archive of German conspiracy-related Telegram channels. Our results demonstrate that conspiratorial actors can be annotated with meaningful agreement and extracted with reasonable accuracy despite the linguistic complexity of conspiracy discourse, enabling large-scale analyses of actor representations in conspiracy narratives.

There has been increasing interest in exploring the capabilities of advanced large language models (LLMs) in the field of information extraction (IE), specifically focusing on tasks related to named entity recognition (NER) and relation extraction (RE).Although researchers are exploring the use of few-shot information extraction through in-context learning with LLMs, they tend to focus only on using correct or positive examples for demonstration, neglecting the potential value of incorporating incorrect or negative examples into the learning process.In this paper, we present LC-ICL a novel few-shot technique that leverages both correct and incorrect sample constructions to create in-context learning demonstrations. This approach enhances the ability of LLMs to extract entities and relations by combining positive samples with negative samples annotated by error-cause labels. These labels expose more detailed error features in erroneous examples, enabling the model to understand why similar predictions fail and avoid repeating such errors during inference.Specifically, our proposed method taps into the inherent contextual information and valuable information in hard negative samples and the nearest positive neighbors to the test and then applies the in-context learning demonstrations based on LLMs. Our experiments on various datasets indicate that LC-ICL outperforms previous few-shot in-context learning methods, delivering substantial enhancements in performance across a broad spectrum of related tasks. These improvements are noteworthy, showcasing the versatility of our approach in diverse scenarios.