Named Entity Recognition

Also known as NER

Overview

Named Entity Recognition (NER) finds entity mentions and assigns labels such as person, location, or disease, helping turn unstructured data into searchable information for applications like knowledge graphs, clinical systems, and privacy protection. Common approaches include fine-tuned transformer encoders with token- or span-level prediction, CRF decoders, and joint extraction models; newer work also uses generative language models, retrieval, and multimodal grounding. Benchmarks and datasets increasingly cover specialized domains, low-resource languages, historical texts, and nested or fine-grained entities, while evaluation often focuses on exact span-level F1 and cross-domain transfer. A central tension is that compact, supervised encoders often remain more accurate and efficient than prompted generative models, while LLMs offer flexible labels and low-resource adaptation but can struggle with boundaries, domain shift, and consistent annotation conventions.

Latest papers

110 papers8 papers in the last four weeks, down 58% on the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

Apr 2, 2026

CV-18 NER: Augmented Common Voice for Named Entity Recognition from Arabic Speech

End-to-end speech Named Entity Recognition (NER) aims to directly extract entities from speech. Prior work has shown that end-to-end (E2E) approaches can outperform cascaded pipelines for English, French, and Chinese, but Arabic remains under-explored due to its morphological complexity, the absence of short vowels, and limited annotated resources. We introduce CV-18 NER, the first publicly available dataset for NER from Arabic speech, created by augmenting the Arabic Common Voice 18 corpus with manual NER annotations following the fine-grained Wojood schema (21 entity types). We benchmark both pipeline systems (ASR + text NER) and E2E models based on Whisper and AraBEST-RQ. E2E systems substantially outperform the best pipeline configuration on the test set, reaching 37.0% CoER (AraBEST-RQ 300M) and 38.0% CVER (Whisper-medium). Further analysis shows that Arabic-specific self-supervised pretraining yields strong ASR performance, while multilingual weak supervision transfers more effectively to joint speech-to-entity learning, and that larger models may be harder to adapt in this low-resource setting. Our dataset and models are publicly released, providing the first open benchmark for end-to-end named entity recognition from Arabic speech https://huggingface.co/datasets/Elyadata/CV18-NER.
Mar 31, 2026

ENEIDE: A High Quality Silver Standard Dataset for Named Entity Recognition and Linking in Historical Italian

This paper introduces ENEIDE (Extracting Named Entities from Italian Digital Editions), a silver standard dataset for Named Entity Recognition and Linking (NERL) in historical Italian texts. The corpus comprises 2,111 documents with over 8,000 entity annotations semi-automatically extracted from two scholarly digital editions: Digital Zibaldone, the philosophical diary of the Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi (1798--1837), and Aldo Moro Digitale, the complete works of the Italian politician Aldo Moro (1916--1978). Annotations cover multiple entity types (person, location, organization, literary work) linked to Wikidata identifiers, including NIL entities that cannot be mapped to the knowledge graph. To the best of our knowledge, ENEIDE represents the first multi-domain, publicly available NERL dataset for historical Italian with training, development, and test splits. We present a methodology for semi-automatic annotations extraction from manually curated scholarly digital editions, including quality control and annotation enhancement procedures. Baseline experiments using state-of-the-art models demonstrate the dataset's challenge for NERL and the gap between zero-shot approaches and fine-tuned models. The dataset's diachronic coverage spanning two centuries makes it particularly suitable for temporal entity disambiguation and cross-domain evaluation. ENEIDE is released under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
Mar 27, 2026

Clinical named entity recognition in the Portuguese language: a benchmark of modern BERT models and LLMs

Clinical notes contain valuable unstructured information. Named entity recognition (NER) enables the automatic extraction of medical concepts; however, benchmarks for Portuguese remain scarce. In this study, we aimed to evaluate BERT-based models and large language models (LLMs) for clinical NER in Portuguese and to test strategies for addressing multilabel imbalance. We compared BioBERTpt, BERTimbau, ModernBERT, and mmBERT with LLMs such as GPT-5 and Gemini-2.5, using the public SemClinBr corpus and a private breast cancer dataset. Models were trained under identical conditions and evaluated using precision, recall, and F1-score. Iterative stratification, weighted loss, and oversampling were explored to mitigate class imbalance. The mmBERT-base model achieved the best performance (micro F1 = 0.76), outperforming all other models. Iterative stratification improved class balance and overall performance. Multilingual BERT models, particularly mmBERT, perform strongly for Portuguese clinical NER and can run locally with limited computational resources. Balanced data-splitting strategies further enhance performance.
Mar 27, 2026

Analysing Lightweight Large Language Models for Biomedical Named Entity Recognition on Diverse Ouput Formats

Despite their strong linguistic capabilities, Large Language Models (LLMs) are computationally demanding and require substantial resources for fine-tuning, which is unadapted to privacy and budget constraints of many healthcare settings. To address this, we present an experimental analysis focused on Biomedical Named Entity Recognition using lightweight LLMs, we evaluate the impact of different output formats on model performance. The results reveal that lightweight LLMs can achieve competitive performance compared to the larger models, highlighting their potential as lightweight yet effective alternatives for biomedical information extraction. Our analysis shows that instruction tuning over many distinct formats does not improve performance, but identifies several format consistently associated with better performance.
Mar 24, 2026

HGNet: Scalable Foundation Model for Automated Knowledge Graph Generation from Scientific Literature

Automated knowledge graph (KG) construction is essential for navigating the rapidly expanding body of scientific literature. However, existing approaches struggle to recognize long multi-word entities, often fail to generalize across domains, and typically overlook the hierarchical nature of scientific knowledge. While general-purpose large language models (LLMs) offer adaptability, they are computationally expensive and yield inconsistent accuracy on specialized tasks. As a result, current KGs are shallow and inconsistent, limiting their utility for exploration and synthesis. We propose a two-stage framework for scalable, zero-shot scientific KG construction. The first stage, Z-NERD, introduces (i) Orthogonal Semantic Decomposition (OSD), which promotes domain-agnostic entity recognition by isolating semantic "turns" in text, and (ii) a Multi-Scale TCQK attention mechanism that captures coherent multi-word entities through n-gram-aware attention heads. The second stage, HGNet, performs relation extraction with hierarchy-aware message passing, explicitly modeling parent, child, and peer relations. To enforce global consistency, we introduce two complementary objectives: a Differentiable Hierarchy Loss to discourage cycles and shortcut edges, and a Continuum Abstraction Field (CAF) Loss that embeds abstraction levels along a learnable axis in Euclidean space. This is the first approach to formalize hierarchical abstraction as a continuous property within standard Euclidean embeddings, offering a simpler alternative to hyperbolic methods. We release SPHERE (https://github.com/basiralab/SPHERE), a multi-domain benchmark for hierarchical relation extraction. Our framework establishes a new state of the art on SciERC, SciER, and SPHERE, improving NER by 8.08% and RE by 5.99% on out-of-distribution tests. In zero-shot settings, gains reach 10.76% for NER and 26.2% for RE.
Mar 18, 2026

A Proposal-Free Query-Guided Network for Grounded Multimodal Named Entity Recognition

Grounded Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (GMNER) identifies named entities, including their spans and types, in natural language text and grounds them to the corresponding regions in associated images. Most existing approaches split this task into two steps: they first detect objects using a pre-trained general-purpose detector and then match named entities to the detected objects. However, these methods face a major limitation. Because pre-trained general-purpose object detectors operate independently of textual entities, they tend to detect common objects and frequently overlook specific fine-grained regions required by named entities. This misalignment between object detectors and entities introduces imprecision and can impair overall system performance. In this paper, we propose a proposal-free Query-Guided Network (QGN) that unifies multimodal reasoning and decoding through text guidance and cross- modal interaction. QGN enables accurate grounding and robust performance in open-domain scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that QGN achieves top performance among compared GMNER models on widely used benchmarks.
Mar 14, 2026

The GELATO Dataset for Legislative NER

This paper introduces GELATO (Government, Executive, Legislative, and Treaty Ontology), a dataset of U.S. House and Senate bills from the 118th Congress annotated using a novel two-level named entity recognition ontology designed for U.S. legislative texts. We fine-tune transformer-based models (BERT, RoBERTa) of different architectures and sizes on this dataset for first-level prediction. We then use LLMs with optimized prompts to complete the second level prediction. The strong performance of RoBERTa and relatively weak performance of BERT models, as well as the application of LLMs as second-level predictors, support future research in legislative NER or downstream tasks using these model combinations as extraction tools.
Mar 8, 2026

A Joint Neural Baseline for Concept, Assertion, and Relation Extraction from Clinical Text

Clinical information extraction (e.g., 2010 i2b2/VA challenge) usually presents tasks of concept recognition, assertion classification, and relation extraction. Jointly modeling the multi-stage tasks in the clinical domain is an underexplored topic. The existing independent task setting (reference inputs given in each stage) makes the joint models not directly comparable to the existing pipeline work. To address these issues, we define a joint task setting and propose a novel end-to-end system to jointly optimize three-stage tasks. We empirically investigate the joint evaluation of our proposal and the pipeline baseline with various embedding techniques: word, contextual, and in-domain contextual embeddings. The proposed joint system substantially outperforms the pipeline baseline by +0.3, +1.4, +3.1 for the concept, assertion, and relation F1. This work bridges joint approaches and clinical information extraction. The proposed approach could serve as a strong joint baseline for future research. The code is publicly available.
Mar 5, 2026

NERdME: a Named Entity Recognition Dataset for Indexing Research Artifacts in Code Repositories

Existing scholarly information extraction (SIE) datasets focus on scientific papers and overlook implementation-level details in code repositories. README files describe datasets, source code, and other implementation-level artifacts, however, their free-form Markdown offers little semantic structure, making automatic information extraction difficult. To address this gap, NERdME is introduced: 200 manually annotated README files with over 10,000 labeled spans and 10 entity types. Baseline results using large language models and fine-tuned transformers show clear differences between paperlevel and implementation-level entities, indicating the value of extending SIE benchmarks with entity types available in README files. A downstream entity-linking experiment was conducted to demonstrate that entities derived from READMEs can support artifact discovery and metadata integration.
Mar 2, 2026

CrimeNER: Curated Dataset and Methods for Research and Investigation in Language Intelligence

The extraction of critical information from crime-related documents is a crucial task for law enforcement agencies. The extraction of this information can be interpreted as a Named-Entity Recognition (NER) task. However, there is a considerable lack of adequately annotated data on general real-world crime scenarios. To address this issue, we present CrimeNER, a case study of crime-related NER, and a general crime-related Named-Entity Recognition database (CrimeNER-db), consisting of more than 1.5K annotated documents extracted from public reports of terrorist attacks and the US Department of Justice's press notes. We define 4 coarse types of crime entity and 21 fine-grained entity types. We address the quality of the presented database with fully supervised experiments using flat and nested NER architectures and zero- and few-shot experiments using Large Language Models (LLMs). The database is available on GitHub.
Mar 2, 2026

OpenAutoNLU: Open Source AutoML Library for NLU

OpenAutoNLU is an open-source automated machine learning library for natural language understanding (NLU) tasks, covering both text classification and named entity recognition (NER). Unlike existing solutions, we introduce data-aware training regime selection that requires no manual configuration from the user. The library also provides integrated data quality diagnostics, configurable out-of-distribution (OOD) detection, and large language model (LLM) features, all within a minimal lowcode API. The demo app is accessible here https://openautonlu.dev.
Mar 1, 2026

Conformal Prediction for Risk-Controlled Medical Entity Extraction Across Clinical Domains

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used for medical entity extraction, yet their confidence scores are often miscalibrated, limiting safe deployment in clinical settings. We present a conformal prediction framework that provides finite-sample coverage guarantees for LLM-based extraction across two clinical domains. First, we extract structured entities from 1,000 FDA drug labels across eight sections using GPT-4.1, verified via FactScore-based atomic statement evaluation (97.7% accuracy over 128,906 entities). Second, we extract radiological entities from MIMIC-CXR reports using the RadGraph schema with GPT-4.1 and Llama-4-Maverick, evaluated against physician annotations (entity F1: 0.81 to 0.84). Our central finding is that miscalibration direction reverses across domains: on well-structured FDA labels, models are underconfident, requiring modest conformal thresholds (τ≈0.06τ\approx 0.06), while on free-text radiology reports, models are overconfident, demanding strict thresholds (ττ up to 0.99). Despite this heterogeneity, conformal prediction achieves target coverage (≥90%\geq 90\%) in both settings with manageable rejection rates (9--13%). These results demonstrate that calibration is not a global model property but depends on document structure, extraction category, and model architecture, motivating domain-specific conformal calibration for safe clinical deployment.
Feb 28, 2026

Learning Nested Named Entity Recognition from Flat Annotations

Nested named entity recognition identifies entities contained within other entities, but requires expensive multi-level annotation. While flat NER corpora exist abundantly, nested resources remain scarce. We investigate whether models can learn nested structure from flat annotations alone, evaluating four approaches: string inclusions (substring matching), entity corruption (pseudo-nested data), flat neutralization (reducing false negative signal), and a hybrid fine-tuned + LLM pipeline. On NEREL, a Russian benchmark with 29 entity types where 21% of entities are nested, our best combined method achieves 26.37% inner F1, closing 40% of the gap to full nested supervision. Code is available at https://github.com/fulstock/Learning-from-Flat-Annotations.
Feb 27, 2026

TRIZ-RAGNER: A Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Model for TRIZ-Aware Named Entity Recognition in Patent-Based Contradiction Mining

TRIZ-based contradiction mining is a fundamental task in patent analysis and systematic innovation, as it enables the identification of improving and worsening technical parameters that drive inventive problem solving. However, existing approaches largely rely on rule-based systems or traditional machine learning models, which struggle with semantic ambiguity, domain dependency, and limited generalization when processing complex patent language. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have shown strong semantic understanding capabilities, yet their direct application to TRIZ parameter extraction remains challenging due to hallucination and insufficient grounding in structured TRIZ knowledge. To address these limitations, this paper proposes TRIZ-RAGNER, a retrieval-augmented large language model framework for TRIZ-aware named entity recognition in patent-based contradiction mining. TRIZ-RAGNER reformulates contradiction mining as a semantic-level NER task and integrates dense retrieval over a TRIZ knowledge base, cross-encoder reranking for context refinement, and structured LLM prompting to extract improving and worsening parameters from patent sentences. By injecting domain-specific TRIZ knowledge into the LLM reasoning process, the proposed framework effectively reduces semantic noise and improves extraction consistency. Experiments on the PaTRIZ dataset demonstrate that TRIZ-RAGNER consistently outperforms traditional sequence labeling models and LLM-based baselines. The proposed framework achieves a precision of 85.6%, a recall of 82.9%, and an F1-score of 84.2% in TRIZ contradiction pair identification. Compared with the strongest baseline using prompt-enhanced GPT, TRIZ-RAGNER yields an absolute F1-score improvement of 7.3 percentage points, confirming the effectiveness of retrieval-augmented TRIZ knowledge grounding for robust and accurate patent-based contradiction mining.
Feb 22, 2026

A Dataset for Named Entity Recognition and Relation Extraction from Art-historical Image Descriptions

This paper introduces FRAME (Fine-grained Recognition of Art-historical Metadata and Entities), a manually annotated dataset of art-historical image descriptions for Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Relation Extraction (RE). Descriptions were collected from museum catalogs, auction listings, open-access platforms, and scholarly databases, then filtered to ensure that each text focuses on a single artwork and contains explicit statements about its material, composition, or iconography. FRAME provides stand-off annotations in three layers: a metadata layer for object-level properties, a content layer for depicted subjects and motifs, and a co-reference layer linking repeated mentions. Across layers, entity spans are labeled with 37 types and connected by typed RE links between mentions. Entity types are aligned with Wikidata to support Named Entity Linking (NEL) and downstream knowledge-graph construction. The dataset is released as UIMA XMI Common Analysis Structure (CAS) files with accompanying images and bibliographic metadata, and can be used to benchmark and fine-tune NER and RE systems, including zero- and few-shot setups with Large Language Models (LLMs).
Jan 25, 2026

Assessment of Generative Named Entity Recognition in the Era of Large Language Models

Named entity recognition (NER) is evolving from a sequence labeling task into a generative paradigm with the rise of large language models (LLMs). We conduct a systematic evaluation of open-source LLMs on both flat and nested NER tasks. We investigate several research questions including the performance gap between generative NER and traditional NER models, the impact of output formats, whether LLMs rely on memorization, and the preservation of general capabilities after fine-tuning. Through experiments across eight LLMs of varying scales and four standard NER datasets, we find that: (1) With parameter-efficient fine-tuning and structured formats like inline bracketed or XML, open-source LLMs achieve performance competitive with traditional encoder-based models and surpass decoder-based LLMs with in-context learning techniques; (2) The NER capability of LLMs stems from instruction-following and generative power, not mere memorization of entity-label pairs; and (3) Applying NER instruction tuning has minimal impact on general capabilities of LLMs, even improving performance on datasets like DROP by 25.50 to 45.32 F1 points due to enhanced entity understanding. These findings demonstrate that generative NER with LLMs is a promising, user-friendly alternative to traditional methods. We release the data and code at https://github.com/szu-tera/LLMs4NER.
Jan 9, 2026

What Matters When Building Universal Multilingual Named Entity Recognition Models?

Recent progress in universal multilingual named entity recognition (NER) has been driven by multilingual transformer models, task-specific architectures, custom loss functions, and large-scale training datasets. However, despite substantial prior work, we find that many design decisions for such models are made without systematic justification, with individual components evaluated only in combination rather than in isolation. We argue that this impedes progress in the field by making it difficult to identify which choices improve multilingual generalization. In this work, we conduct an extensive empirical evaluation on transformer backbones, architectures, training objectives, data composition, and threshold selection for zero-shot, multilingual NER models. Building on these findings, we present Otter, a small encoder model that achieves consistent improvements over strong multilingual NER baselines, outperforming similarly sized models by 5.7 percentage points in F1. Further, it remains within 1.4 points of Qwen3-32B and 5.4 points below Gemma3-27B, while being roughly 90x smaller and one to two orders of magnitude faster at inference.
Sep 9, 2025

SciNLP: A Domain-Specific Benchmark for Full-Text Scientific Entity and Relation Extraction in NLP

Structured information extraction from scientific literature is crucial for capturing core concepts and emerging trends in specialized fields. While existing datasets aid model development, most focus on specific publication sections due to domain complexity and the high cost of annotating scientific texts. To address this limitation, we introduce SciNLP - a specialized benchmark for full-text entity and relation extraction in the Natural Language Processing (NLP) domain. The dataset comprises 60 manually annotated full-text NLP publications, covering 6,429 entities and 1,649 relation. Compared to existing research, SciNLP is the first dataset providing full-text annotations of entities and their relationships in the NLP domain. To validate the effectiveness of SciNLP, we conducted comparative experiments with similar datasets and evaluated the performance of state-of-the-art supervised models on this dataset. Results reveal varying extraction capabilities of existing models across academic texts of different lengths. Cross-comparisons with existing datasets show that SciNLP achieves significant performance improvements on certain baseline models. Using models trained on SciNLP, we implemented automatic construction of a fine-grained knowledge graph for the NLP domain. Our KG has an average node degree of 3.3 per entity, indicating rich semantic topological information that enhances downstream applications. The dataset is publicly available at: https://github.com/AKADDC/SciNLP.
Jul 18, 2025

Label Unification for Cross-Dataset Generalization in Cybersecurity NER

The field of cybersecurity NER lacks standard-ized labels, making it challenging to combine datasets. We investigate label unification across four cybersecurity datasets to increase data resource usability. We perform a coarse-grained label unification and conduct pairwise cross-dataset evaluations using RoBERTa models. Qualitative analysis of predictions reveals errors, limitations, and dataset differences. To address unification limitations, we propose alternative architectures including a multi-head model and a graph-based transfer model. Under our selected mapping and training setup, unified training underperformed the corresponding single-dataset baselines on all four development sets. The multi-head model with weight sharing provides no consistent benefits over single-dataset baselines, and the graph-based transfer model shows no consistent benefits.
Dec 7, 2024

Auto-AdvER: Disentangling Condition, History, and Commercial Offers in Automotive Advertisements

This paper presents a case study on the development of Auto-AdvER, a specialised span-labelling schema, along with its corresponding dataset for the textual car advertisement domain. Developed with industry needs in mind, Auto-AdvER is designed to enhance text mining analytics in this domain and contributes a linguistically unique sequence-labelling dataset. We introduce a schema consisting of three labels: 'Condition', 'Historic', and 'Sales Options'. We outline the guiding principles for annotation, describe the methodology for schema development, and present the results of an annotation study demonstrating an inter-annotator agreement of 78%. Furthermore, we compare the performance of various models, including transformer encoder models (BERT, DeBERTaV3) and transformer decoder-based open- and closed-source large language models: Llama, Qwen, GPT, and Gemini, as well as conditional random fields. Our results show that a fine-tuned DeBERTaV3 encoder achieves the highest F1-score, followed closely by conditional random fields, while the large language models reach the highest precision but lower recall. We present this work as a stepping stone towards more fine-grained analysis and discuss Auto-AdvER's potential impact on advertisement analytics, pricing, and customer insights. Potential applications include the analysis of market dynamics and data-driven predictive maintenance.