Effective In-Context Learning for Named Entity Recognition

Jin Zhao, Qian Guo, Jiaqing Liang, Zhixu Li, Yanghua Xiao

Abstract: Named entity recognition aims to identify meaningful words or phrases from text. Traditional NER methods depend heavily on training datasets to learn entity features, which often leads to poor performance in recognizing low-resource entities. Large language models offer a promising solution in low-resource scenarios, but they struggle with entity boundary recognition and often suffer from hallucination issues due to their reliance on general-purpose corpora. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that enhances LLMs’ performance in NER by integrating a boundary regularity extraction algorithm and an explanatory path extraction method. The boundary regularity algorithm leverages ChatGPT’s summarization capabilities to articulate entity boundaries in natural language, improving boundary detection accuracy. The explanatory path method constructs logical reasoning steps from text to entity recognition, guiding LLMs to generate more accurate predictions and mitigating hallucination problems. Extensive experiments on three public datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms current mainstream LLMs in accurately recognizing entities from unstructured text. These findings validate the effectiveness of our approach and its potential to address key challenges in NER.