提出新评估指标,揭示合成数据中的标签相似性对零样本命名实体识别结果的高估问题。
Familiarity: Better Evaluation of Zero-Shot Named Entity Recognition by Quantifying Label Shifts in Synthetic Training Data
- 设计Familiarity指标,量化训练与测试数据间实体类型语义相似度和频率差异。
- 发现现有合成数据与评测集存在大量标签重叠,导致F1分数虚高。
- 帮助研究者定制不同难度的评测设置,更真实地衡量模型泛化能力。
零样本命名实体识别(Zero-shot NER)旨在不依赖任何标注样本的情况下检测特定类型的命名实体(如'人名'或'药品')。当前研究越来越多地依赖大规模合成数据集进行训练,这些数据集可覆盖数万种不同实体类型。然而,本文发现这些合成数据集常包含与标准评测基准语义高度相似甚至相同的实体类型。由于这种重叠,现有报告的零样本NER F1分数高估了模型的真实性能。此外,当前评估方式未能量化训练与评测数据间的标签偏移(即标签相似性),无法全面反映零样本能力。为此,本文提出Familiarity,一种同时捕捉训练与评测集中实体类型语义相似性及其在训练数据中频率的新型度量,以估计标签偏移。该指标使研究者能够基于自定义合成训练数据,合理解释报告的零样本NER得分,并生成具有不同迁移难度的评测设置,实现对零样本NER能力的细粒度分析。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Zero-shot named entity recognition (NER) is the task of detecting named entities of specific types (such as 'Person' or 'Medicine') without any training examples. Current research increasingly relies on large synthetic datasets, automatically generated to cover tens of thousands of distinct entity types, to train zero-shot NER models. However, in this paper, we find that these synthetic datasets often contain entity types that are semantically highly similar to (or even the same as) those in standard evaluation benchmarks. Because of this overlap, we argue that reported F1 scores for zero-shot NER overestimate the true capabilities of these approaches. Further, we argue that current evaluation setups provide an incomplete picture of zero-shot abilities since they do not quantify the label shift (i.e., the similarity of labels) between training and evaluation datasets. To address these issues, we propose Familiarity, a novel metric that captures both the semantic similarity between entity types in training and evaluation, as well as their frequency in the training data, to provide an estimate of label shift. It allows researchers to contextualize reported zero-shot NER scores when using custom synthetic training datasets. Further, it enables researchers to generate evaluation setups of various transfer difficulties for fine-grained analysis of zero-shot NER.
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