Retrieval Augmented Instruction Tuning for Open NER with Large Language Models

The strong capability of large language models (LLMs) has been applied to information extraction (IE) through either retrieval augmented prompting or instruction tuning (IT). However, the best way to incorporate information with LLMs for IE remains an open question. In this paper, we explore Retrieval Augmented Instruction Tuning (RA-IT) for IE, focusing on the task of open named entity recognition (NER). Specifically, for each training sample, we retrieve semantically similar examples from the training dataset as the context and prepend them to the input of the original instruction. To evaluate our RA-IT approach more thoroughly, we construct a Chinese IT dataset for open NER and evaluate RA-IT in both English and Chinese scenarios. Experimental results verify the effectiveness of RA-IT across various data sizes and in both English and Chinese scenarios. We also conduct thorough studies to explore the impacts of various retrieval strategies in the proposed RA-IT framework. Code and data are available at: https://github.com/Emma1066/Retrieval-Augmented-IT-OpenNER

Aligning Large Language Models to a Domain-specific Graph Database

Graph Databases (Graph DB) are widely applied in various fields, including finance, social networks, and medicine. However, translating Natural Language (NL) into the Graph Query Language (GQL), commonly known as NL2GQL, proves to be challenging due to its inherent complexity and specialized nature. Some approaches have sought to utilize Large Language Models (LLMs) to address analogous tasks like text2SQL. Nevertheless, when it comes to NL2GQL taskson a particular domain, the absence of domain-specific NL-GQL data pairs makes it difficult to establish alignment between LLMs and the graph DB. To address this challenge, we propose a well-defined pipeline. Specifically, we utilize ChatGPT to create NL-GQL data pairs based on the given graph DB with self-instruct. Then, we use the created data to fine-tune LLMs, thereby achieving alignment between LLMs and the graph DB. Additionally, during inference, we propose a method that extracts relevant schema to the queried NL as the input context to guide LLMs for generating accurate GQLs.We evaluate our method on two constructed datasets deriving from graph DBs in finance domain and medicine domain, namely FinGQL and MediGQL. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms a set of baseline methods, with improvements of 5.90 and 6.36 absolute points on EM, and 6.00 and 7.09 absolute points on EX, respectively.

Self-Improving for Zero-Shot Named Entity Recognition with Large Language Models

Exploring the application of powerful large language models (LLMs) on the fundamental named entity recognition (NER) task has drawn much attention recently. This work aims to investigate the possibilities of pushing the boundary of zero-shot NER with LLM via a training-free self-improving strategy. We propose a self-improving framework, which utilize an unlabeled corpus to stimulate the self-learning ability of LLMs on NER. First, we use LLM to make predictions on the unlabeled corpus and obtain the self-annotated data. Second, we explore various strategies to select reliable samples from the self-annotated dataset as demonstrations, considering the similarity, diversity and reliability of demonstrations. Finally, we conduct inference for the test query via in-context learning with the selected self-annotated demonstrations. Through comprehensive experimental analysis, our study yielded the following findings: (1) The self-improving framework further pushes the boundary of zero-shot NER with LLMs, and achieves an obvious performance improvement; (2) Iterative self-improving or naively increasing the size of unlabeled corpus does not guarantee improvements; (3) There might still be space for improvement via more advanced strategy for reliable entity selection.

Empirical Study of Zero-Shot NER with ChatGPT

Large language models (LLMs) exhibited powerful capability in various natural language processing tasks. This work focuses on exploring LLM performance on zero-shot information extraction, with a focus on the ChatGPT and named entity recognition (NER) task. Inspired by the remarkable reasoning capability of LLM on symbolic and arithmetic reasoning, we adapt the prevalent reasoning methods to NER and propose reasoning strategies tailored for NER. First, we explore a decomposed question-answering paradigm by breaking down the NER task into simpler subproblems by labels. Second, we propose syntactic augmentation to stimulate the model's intermediate thinking in two ways: syntactic prompting, which encourages the model to analyze the syntactic structure itself, and tool augmentation, which provides the model with the syntactic information generated by a parsing tool. Besides, we adapt self-consistency to NER by proposing a two-stage majority voting strategy, which first votes for the most consistent mentions, then the most consistent types. The proposed methods achieve remarkable improvements for zero-shot NER across seven benchmarks, including Chinese and English datasets, and on both domain-specific and general-domain scenarios. In addition, we present a comprehensive analysis of the error types with suggestions for optimization directions. We also verify the effectiveness of the proposed methods on the few-shot setting and other LLMs.