Few-shot Learning for Sumerian Named Entity Recognition

Abstract

This paper presents our study in exploring the task of named entity recognition (NER) in a low resource setting, focusing on few-shot learning on the Sumerian NER task.The Sumerian language is deemed as an extremely low-resource language due to that (1) it is a long dead language, (2) highly skilled language experts are extremely scarce.NER on Sumerian text is important in that it helps identify the actors and entities active in a given period of time from the collections of tens of thousands of texts in building socio-economic networks of the archives of interest.As a text classification task, NER tends to become challenging when the amount of annotated data is limited or the model is required to handle new classes.The Sumerian NER is no exception.In this work, we propose to use two few-shot learning systems, ProtoBERT and NNShot, to the Sumerian NER task.Our experiments show that the Pro-toBERT NER generally outperforms both the NNShot NER and the fully supervised BERT NER in low resource settings on the predictions of rare classes.In particular, F1-score of Pro-toBERT on unseen entity types on our test set has achieved 89.6% that is significantly better than the F1-score of 84.3% of the BERT NER.