DiffusionNER: Boundary Diffusion for Named Entity Recognition

Yongliang Shen, Kaitao Song, Xu Tan, Dongsheng Li, Weiming Lu, Yueting Zhuang


Abstract
In this paper, we propose DiffusionNER, which formulates the named entity recognition task as a boundary-denoising diffusion process and thus generates named entities from noisy spans. During training, DiffusionNER gradually adds noises to the golden entity boundaries by a fixed forward diffusion process and learns a reverse diffusion process to recover the entity boundaries. In inference, DiffusionNER first randomly samples some noisy spans from a standard Gaussian distribution and then generates the named entities by denoising them with the learned reverse diffusion process. The proposed boundary-denoising diffusion process allows progressive refinement and dynamic sampling of entities, empowering DiffusionNER with efficient and flexible entity generation capability. Experiments on multiple flat and nested NER datasets demonstrate that DiffusionNER achieves comparable or even better performance than previous state-of-the-art models.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.215
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3875–3890
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.215
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.215
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yongliang Shen, Kaitao Song, Xu Tan, Dongsheng Li, Weiming Lu, and Yueting Zhuang. 2023. DiffusionNER: Boundary Diffusion for Named Entity Recognition. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 3875–3890, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
DiffusionNER: Boundary Diffusion for Named Entity Recognition (Shen et al., ACL 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.215.pdf
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