GEIC: Universal and Multilingual Named Entity Recognition with Large Language Models

Hanjun Luo, Yingbin Jin, Xuecheng Liu, Tong Shang, Ruizhe Chen, Zuozhu Liu

Abstract: With the advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs), more and more researchers apply LLMs for Named Entity Recognition (NER) methods, bringing vitality to this classical Natural Language Processing task. However, existing datasets are designed for traditional machine learning methods, inadequate for LLM-based methods in terms of corpus selection, entity categorization, and design logic. This limitation leads to less effective evaluation and model fine-tuning. To address this issue, we propose DynamicNER, the first NER dataset specifically designed for LLMs and with dynamic categorization, transcending the limitations of fixed categorization in existing datasets. It is also multi-lingual and multi-granular, covering 8 languages and 155 entity types, with corpus spanning multiple specialized domains. Furthermore, in response to the limitations demonstrated by existing LLM-based methods during DynamicNER testing, we develop CascadeNER, a novel NER method based on a two-stage strategy and lightweight LLMs, addressing the problems in current methods. Experiments show that DynamicNER is an effective benchmark for LLM-based NER methods, and CascadeNER outperforms existing methods with fewer computational resources. Our work is opened at https://github.com/CascadeNER/CascadeNER.