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| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
| Published: |
2025
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.23722 |
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| _version_ | 1866911238382944256 |
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| author | Bai, Fan Hassanzadeh, Hamid Saeedi, Ardavan Dredze, Mark |
| author_facet | Bai, Fan Hassanzadeh, Hamid Saeedi, Ardavan Dredze, Mark |
| contents | In-context learning (ICL) enables large language models (LLMs) to perform new tasks using only a few demonstrations. However, in Named Entity Recognition (NER), existing ICL methods typically rely on task-agnostic semantic similarity for demonstration retrieval, which often yields less relevant examples and leads to inferior results. We introduce DEER, a training-free ICL approach that enables LLMs to make more informed entity predictions through the use of label-grounded statistics. DEER leverages token-level statistics from training labels to identify tokens most informative for entity recognition, enabling entity-focused demonstrations. It further uses these statistics to detect and refine error-prone tokens through a targeted reflection step. Evaluated on five NER datasets across four LLMs, DEER consistently outperforms existing ICL methods and achieves performance comparable to supervised fine-tuning. Further analyses demonstrate that DEER improves example retrieval, remains effective on both seen and unseen entities, and exhibits strong robustness in low-resource settings. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_23722 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | LLMs are Better Than You Think: Label-Guided In-Context Learning for Named Entity Recognition Bai, Fan Hassanzadeh, Hamid Saeedi, Ardavan Dredze, Mark Computation and Language In-context learning (ICL) enables large language models (LLMs) to perform new tasks using only a few demonstrations. However, in Named Entity Recognition (NER), existing ICL methods typically rely on task-agnostic semantic similarity for demonstration retrieval, which often yields less relevant examples and leads to inferior results. We introduce DEER, a training-free ICL approach that enables LLMs to make more informed entity predictions through the use of label-grounded statistics. DEER leverages token-level statistics from training labels to identify tokens most informative for entity recognition, enabling entity-focused demonstrations. It further uses these statistics to detect and refine error-prone tokens through a targeted reflection step. Evaluated on five NER datasets across four LLMs, DEER consistently outperforms existing ICL methods and achieves performance comparable to supervised fine-tuning. Further analyses demonstrate that DEER improves example retrieval, remains effective on both seen and unseen entities, and exhibits strong robustness in low-resource settings. |
| title | LLMs are Better Than You Think: Label-Guided In-Context Learning for Named Entity Recognition |
| topic | Computation and Language |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.23722 |