Coner: A Collaborative Approach For Long-Tail Named Entity Recognition In Scientific Publications

Named Entity Recognition (NER) for rare long-tail entities as e.g., often found in domain-specific scientific publications is a challenging task, as typically the extensive training data and test data for fine-tuning NER algorithms is lacking. Recent approaches presented promising solutions relying on training NER algorithms in an iterative weakly-supervised fashion, thus limiting human interaction to only providing a small set of seed terms. Such approaches heavily rely on heuristics in order to cope with the limited training data size. As these heuristics are prone to failure, the overall achievable performance is limited. In this paper, we therefore introduce a collaborative approach which incrementally incorporates human feedback on the relevance of extracted entities into the training cycle of such iterative NER algorithms. This approach, called Coner, allows to still train new domain specific rare long-tail NER extractors with low costs, but with ever increasing performance while the algorithm is actively used in an application.