GNNer: Reducing Overlapping in Span-based NER Using Graph Neural Networks

There are two main paradigms for Named Entity Recognition (NER): sequence labelling and span classification. Sequence labelling aims to assign a label to each word in an input text using, for example, BIO (Begin, Inside and Outside) tagging, while span classification involves enumerating all possible spans in a text and classifying them into their labels. In contrast to sequence labelling, unconstrained span-based methods tend to assign entity labels to overlapping spans, which is generally undesirable, especially for NER tasks without nested entities. Accordingly, we propose GNNer, a framework that uses Graph Neural Networks to enrich the span representation to reduce the number of overlapping spans during prediction. Our approach reduces the number of overlapping spans compared to strong baseline while maintaining competitive metric performance. Code is available at https://github.com/urchade/GNNer.