Granular Entity Mapper: Advancing Fine-grained Multimodal Named Entity Recognition and Grounding

ACL ARR 2024 June Submission2694 Authors

15 Jun 2024 (modified: 13 Aug 2024)ACL ARR 2024 June SubmissionEveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY 4.0
Abstract: Multimodal Named Entity Recognition and Grounding (MNERG) aims to extract paired textual and visual entities from texts and images. It has been well explored through a two-step paradigm: initially identifying potential visual entities using object detection methods and then aligning the extracted textual entities with their corresponding visual entities. However, when it comes to fine-grained MNERG, the long-tailed distribution of textual entity categories and the performance of object detectors limit the effectiveness of traditional methods. Specifically, more detailed classification leads to many low-frequency categories, and existing object detection methods often fail to pinpoint subtle regions within images. To address these challenges, we propose the Granular Entity Mapper (GEM) framework. Firstly, we design a multi-granularity entity recognition module, followed by a reranking module based on the Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) to incorporate hierarchical information of entity categories, visual cues, and external textual resources collectively for accurate fine-grained textual entity recognition. Then, we utilize a pre-trained Large Visual Language Model (LVLM) as an implicit visual entity grounder that directly deduces relevant visual entity regions from the entire image without the need for bounding box training. Experimental results on the GMNER and FMNERG datasets demonstrate that our GEM framework achieves state-of-the-art results on the fine-grained content extraction task.
Paper Type: Long
Research Area: Information Extraction
Research Area Keywords: named entity recognition and relation extraction, cross-modal information extraction, multimodality
Languages Studied: English
Submission Number: 2694
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