Named Entity Recognition(NER) for low-resource languages aims to produce robust systems for languages where there is limited labeled training data available, and has been an area of increasing interest within NLP. Data augmentation for increasing the amount of low-resource labeled data is a common practice. In this paper, we explore the role of synthetic data in the context of multilingual, low-resource NER, considering 11 languages from diverse language families. Our results suggest that synthetic data does in fact hold promise for low-resource language NER, though we see significant variation between languages.

The COVID-19 pandemic causes severe social and economic disruption around the world, raising various subjects that are discussed over social media. Identifying pandemic-related named entities as expressed on social media is fundamental and important to understand the discussions about the pandemic. However, there is limited work on named entity recognition on this topic due to the following challenges: 1) COVID-19 texts in social media are informal and their annotations are rare and insufficient to train a robust recognition model, and 2) named entity recognition in COVID-19 requires extensive domain-specific knowledge. To address these issues, we propose a novel entity knowledge augmentation approach for COVID-19, which can also be applied in general biomedical named entity recognition in both informal text format and formal text format. Experiments carried out on the COVID-19 tweets dataset and PubMed dataset show that our proposed entity knowledge augmentation improves NER performance in both fully-supervised and few-shot settings. Our source code is publicly available: https://github.com/kkkenshi/LLM-EKA/tree/master

We introduce KyrgyzNER, the first manually annotated named entity recognition dataset for the Kyrgyz language. Comprising 1,499 news articles from the 24.KG news portal, the dataset contains 10,900 sentences and 39,075 entity mentions across 27 named entity classes. We show our annotation scheme, discuss the challenges encountered in the annotation process, and present the descriptive statistics. We also evaluate several named entity recognition models, including traditional sequence labeling approaches based on conditional random fields and state-of-the-art multilingual transformer-based models fine-tuned on our dataset. While all models show difficulties with rare entity categories, models such as the multilingual RoBERTa variant pretrained on a large corpus across many languages achieve a promising balance between precision and recall. These findings emphasize both the challenges and opportunities of using multilingual pretrained models for processing languages with limited resources. Although the multilingual RoBERTa model performed best, other multilingual models yielded comparable results. This suggests that future work exploring more granular annotation schemes may offer deeper insights for Kyrgyz language processing pipelines evaluation.

Automated clinical coding involves mapping unstructured text from Electronic Health Records (EHRs) to standardized code systems such as the International Classification of Diseases (ICD). While recent advances in deep learning have significantly improved the accuracy and efficiency of ICD coding, the lack of explainability in these models remains a major limitation, undermining trust and transparency. Current explorations about explainability largely rely on attention-based techniques and qualitative assessments by physicians, yet lack systematic evaluation using consistent criteria on high-quality rationale datasets, as well as dedicated approaches explicitly trained to generate rationales for further enhancing explanation. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of the explainability of the rationales for ICD coding through two key lenses: faithfulness that evaluates how well explanations reflect the model's actual reasoning and plausibility that measures how consistent the explanations are with human expert judgment. To facilitate the evaluation of plausibility, we construct a new rationale-annotated dataset, offering denser annotations with diverse granularity and aligns better with current clinical practice, and conduct evaluation across three types of rationales of ICD coding. Encouraged by the promising plausibility of LLM-generated rationales for ICD coding, we further propose new rationale learning methods to improve the quality of model-generated rationales, where rationales produced by prompting LLMs with/without annotation examples are used as distant supervision signals. We empirically find that LLM-generated rationales align most closely with those of human experts. Moreover, incorporating few-shot human-annotated examples not only further improves rationale generation but also enhances rationale-learning approaches.

We study the problem of named entity recognition (NER) based on demonstration learning in low-resource scenarios. We identify two issues in demonstration construction and model training . Firstly, existing methods for selecting demonstration examples primarily rely on semantic similarity; We show that feature similarity can provide significant performance improvement. Secondly, we show that the NER tagger's ability to reference demonstration examples is generally inadequate. We propose a demonstration and training approach that effectively addresses these issues. For the first issue, we propose to select examples by dual similarity, which comprises both semantic similarity and feature similarity. For the second issue, we propose to train an NER model with adversarial demonstration such that the model is forced to refer to the demonstrations when performing the tagging task. We conduct comprehensive experiments in low-resource NER tasks, and the results demonstrate that our method outperforms a range of methods.

We introduce Konooz, a novel multi-dimensional corpus covering 16 Arabic dialects across 10 domains, resulting in 160 distinct corpora. The corpus comprises about 777k tokens, carefully collected and manually annotated with 21 entity types using both nested and flat annotation schemes - using the Wojood guidelines. While Konooz is useful for various NLP tasks like domain adaptation and transfer learning, this paper primarily focuses on benchmarking existing Arabic Named Entity Recognition (NER) models, especially cross-domain and cross-dialect model performance. Our benchmarking of four Arabic NER models using Konooz reveals a significant drop in performance of up to 38% when compared to the in-distribution data. Furthermore, we present an in-depth analysis of domain and dialect divergence and the impact of resource scarcity. We also measured the overlap between domains and dialects using the Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) metric, and illustrated why certain NER models perform better on specific dialects and domains. Konooz is open-source and publicly available at https://sina.birzeit.edu/wojood/#download

This paper addresses the challenge of Named Entity Recognition (NER) for person names within the specialized domain of Russian news texts concerning cultural events. The study utilizes the unique SPbLitGuide dataset, a collection of event announcements from Saint Petersburg spanning 1999 to 2019. A comparative evaluation of diverse NER models is presented, encompassing established transformer-based architectures such as DeepPavlov, RoBERTa, and SpaCy, alongside recent Large Language Models (LLMs) including GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and GPT-4o. Key findings highlight the superior performance of GPT-4o when provided with specific prompting for JSON output, achieving an F1 score of 0.93. Furthermore, GPT-4 demonstrated the highest precision at 0.99. The research contributes to a deeper understanding of current NER model capabilities and limitations when applied to morphologically rich languages like Russian within the cultural heritage domain, offering insights for researchers and practitioners. Follow-up evaluation with GPT-4.1 (April 2025) achieves F1=0.94 for both simple and structured prompts, demonstrating rapid progress across model families and simplified deployment requirements.

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a fundamental task in Natural Language Processing (NLP) that plays a crucial role in information extraction, question answering, and knowledge-based systems. Traditional deep learning-based NER models often struggle with domain-specific generalization and suffer from data sparsity issues. In this work, we introduce Knowledge Graph distilled for Named Entity Recognition (KoGNER), a novel approach that integrates Knowledge Graph (KG) distillation into NER models to enhance entity recognition performance. Our framework leverages structured knowledge representations from KGs to enrich contextual embeddings, thereby improving entity classification and reducing ambiguity in entity detection. KoGNER employs a two-step process: (1) Knowledge Distillation, where external knowledge sources are distilled into a lightweight representation for seamless integration with NER models, and (2) Entity-Aware Augmentation, which integrates contextual embeddings that have been enriched with knowledge graph information directly into GNN, thereby improving the model's ability to understand and represent entity relationships. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate that KoGNER achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming finetuned NER models and LLMs by a significant margin. These findings suggest that leveraging knowledge graphs as auxiliary information can significantly improve NER accuracy, making KoGNER a promising direction for future research in knowledge-aware NLP.

A timely and effective response is crucial to minimize damage and save lives during natural disasters like earthquakes. Microblogging platforms, particularly Twitter, have emerged as valuable real-time information sources for such events. This work explores the potential of leveraging Twitter data for earthquake response analysis. We develop a machine learning (ML) framework by incorporating natural language processing (NLP) techniques to extract and analyze relevant information from tweets posted during earthquake events. The approach primarily focuses on extracting location data from tweets to identify affected areas, generating severity maps, and utilizing WebGIS to display valuable information. The insights gained from this analysis can aid emergency responders, government agencies, humanitarian organizations, and NGOs in enhancing their disaster response strategies and facilitating more efficient resource allocation during earthquake events.

Many sensitive domains -- such as the clinical domain -- lack widely available datasets due to privacy risks. The increasing generative capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have made synthetic datasets a viable path forward. In this study, we domain-adapt LLMs to the clinical domain and generate synthetic clinical texts that are machine-annotated with tags for personally identifiable information using capable encoder-based NER models. The synthetic corpora are then used to train synthetic NER models. The results show that training NER models using synthetic corpora incurs only a small drop in predictive performance. The limits of this process are investigated in a systematic ablation study -- using both Swedish and Spanish data. Our analysis shows that smaller datasets can be sufficient for domain-adapting LLMs for data synthesis. Instead, the effectiveness of this process is almost entirely contingent on the performance of the machine-annotating NER models trained using the original data.