Recently, considerable literature has grown up around the theme of few-shot named entity recognition (NER), but little published benchmark data specifically focused on the practical and challenging task. Current approaches collect existing supervised NER datasets and re-organize them to the few-shot setting for empirical study. These strategies conventionally aim to recognize coarse-grained entity types with few examples, while in practice, most unseen entity types are fine-grained. In this paper, we present Few-NERD, a large-scale human-annotated few-shot NER dataset with a hierarchy of 8 coarse-grained and 66 fine-grained entity types. Few-NERD consists of 188,238 sentences from Wikipedia, 4,601,160 words are included and each is annotated as context or a part of a two-level entity type. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first few-shot NER dataset and the largest human-crafted NER dataset. We construct benchmark tasks with different emphases to comprehensively assess the generalization capability of models. Extensive empirical results and analysis show that Few-NERD is challenging and the problem requires further research. We make Few-NERD public at https://ningding97.github.io/fewnerd/.

Recognizing relations between entities is a pivotal task of relational learning. Learning relation representations from distantly-labeled datasets is difficult because of the abundant label noise and complicated expressions in human language. This paper aims to learn predictive, interpretable, and robust relation representations from distantly-labeled data that are effective in different settings, including supervised, distantly supervised, and few-shot learning. Instead of solely relying on the supervision from noisy labels, we propose to learn prototypes for each relation from contextual information to best explore the intrinsic semantics of relations. Prototypes are representations in the feature space abstracting the essential semantics of relations between entities in sentences. We learn prototypes based on objectives with clear geometric interpretation, where the prototypes are unit vectors uniformly dispersed in a unit ball, and statement embeddings are centered at the end of their corresponding prototype vectors on the surface of the ball. This approach allows us to learn meaningful, interpretable prototypes for the final classification. Results on several relation learning tasks show that our model significantly outperforms the previous state-of-the-art models. We further demonstrate the robustness of the encoder and the interpretability of prototypes with extensive experiments.

Keyphrase extraction (KE) aims to summarize a set of phrases that accurately express a concept or a topic covered in a given document. Recently, Sequence-to-Sequence (Seq2Seq) based generative framework is widely used in KE task, and it has obtained competitive performance on various benchmarks. The main challenges of Seq2Seq methods lie in acquiring informative latent document representation and better modeling the compositionality of the target keyphrases set, which will directly affect the quality of generated keyphrases. In this paper, we propose to adopt the Dynamic Graph Convolutional Networks (DGCN) to solve the above two problems simultaneously. Concretely, we explore to integrate dependency trees with GCN for latent representation learning. Moreover, the graph structure in our model is dynamically modified during the learning process according to the generated keyphrases. To this end, our approach is able to explicitly learn the relations within the keyphrases collection and guarantee the information interchange between encoder and decoder in both directions. Extensive experiments on various KE benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.