Causal Interventions-based Few-Shot Named Entity Recognition

Abstract

Few-shot named entity recognition (NER) systems aims at recognizing new classes of entities based on a few labeled samples. A significant challenge in the few-shot regime is prone to overfitting than the tasks with abundant samples. The heavy overfitting in few-shot learning is mainly led by spurious correlation caused by the few samples selection bias. To alleviate the problem of the spurious correlation in the few-shot NER, in this paper, we propose a causal intervention-based few-shot NER method. Based on the prototypical network, the method intervenes in the context and prototype via backdoor adjustment during training. In particular, intervening in the context of the one-shot scenario is very difficult, so we intervene in the prototype via incremental learning, which can also avoid catastrophic forgetting. Our experiments on different benchmarks show that our approach achieves new state-of-the-art results (achieving up to 29% absolute improvement and 12% on average for all tasks).