NER4all or Context is All You Need: Using LLMs for low-effort, high-performance NER on historical texts. A humanities informed approach
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arXiv
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| Main Authors: | , , , , , , , , , , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2025
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| _version_ | 1866912222627758080 |
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| author | Hiltmann, Torsten Dröge, Martin Dresselhaus, Nicole Grallert, Till Althage, Melanie Bayer, Paul Eckenstaler, Sophie Mendi, Koray Schmitz, Jascha Marijn Schneider, Philipp Sczeponik, Wiebke Skibba, Anica |
| author_facet | Hiltmann, Torsten Dröge, Martin Dresselhaus, Nicole Grallert, Till Althage, Melanie Bayer, Paul Eckenstaler, Sophie Mendi, Koray Schmitz, Jascha Marijn Schneider, Philipp Sczeponik, Wiebke Skibba, Anica |
| contents | Named entity recognition (NER) is a core task for historical research in automatically establishing all references to people, places, events and the like. Yet, do to the high linguistic and genre diversity of sources, only limited canonisation of spellings, the level of required historical domain knowledge, and the scarcity of annotated training data, established approaches to natural language processing (NLP) have been both extremely expensive and yielded only unsatisfactory results in terms of recall and precision. Our paper introduces a new approach. We demonstrate how readily-available, state-of-the-art LLMs significantly outperform two leading NLP frameworks, spaCy and flair, for NER in historical documents by seven to twentytwo percent higher F1-Scores. Our ablation study shows how providing historical context to the task and a bit of persona modelling that turns focus away from a purely linguistic approach are core to a successful prompting strategy. We also demonstrate that, contrary to our expectations, providing increasing numbers of examples in few-shot approaches does not improve recall or precision below a threshold of 16-shot. In consequence, our approach democratises access to NER for all historians by removing the barrier of scripting languages and computational skills required for established NLP tools and instead leveraging natural language prompts and consumer-grade tools and frontends. |
| format | Preprint |
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arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_04351 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | NER4all or Context is All You Need: Using LLMs for low-effort, high-performance NER on historical texts. A humanities informed approach Hiltmann, Torsten Dröge, Martin Dresselhaus, Nicole Grallert, Till Althage, Melanie Bayer, Paul Eckenstaler, Sophie Mendi, Koray Schmitz, Jascha Marijn Schneider, Philipp Sczeponik, Wiebke Skibba, Anica Computation and Language Artificial Intelligence I.2.7 Named entity recognition (NER) is a core task for historical research in automatically establishing all references to people, places, events and the like. Yet, do to the high linguistic and genre diversity of sources, only limited canonisation of spellings, the level of required historical domain knowledge, and the scarcity of annotated training data, established approaches to natural language processing (NLP) have been both extremely expensive and yielded only unsatisfactory results in terms of recall and precision. Our paper introduces a new approach. We demonstrate how readily-available, state-of-the-art LLMs significantly outperform two leading NLP frameworks, spaCy and flair, for NER in historical documents by seven to twentytwo percent higher F1-Scores. Our ablation study shows how providing historical context to the task and a bit of persona modelling that turns focus away from a purely linguistic approach are core to a successful prompting strategy. We also demonstrate that, contrary to our expectations, providing increasing numbers of examples in few-shot approaches does not improve recall or precision below a threshold of 16-shot. In consequence, our approach democratises access to NER for all historians by removing the barrier of scripting languages and computational skills required for established NLP tools and instead leveraging natural language prompts and consumer-grade tools and frontends. |
| title | NER4all or Context is All You Need: Using LLMs for low-effort, high-performance NER on historical texts. A humanities informed approach |
| topic | Computation and Language Artificial Intelligence I.2.7 |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.04351 |