Thailand

We present WojoodNER-$2024$, the second Arabic Named Entity Recognition (NER) Shared Task. In WojoodNER-$2024$, we focus on fine-grained Arabic NER. We provided participants with a new Arabic fine-grained NER dataset called Wojoodfine, annotated with subtypes of entities. WojoodNER-$2024$ encompassed three subtasks: ($i$) Closed-Track Flat Fine-Grained NER, ($ii$) Closed-Track Nested Fine-Grained NER, and ($iii$) an Open-Track NER for the Israeli War on Gaza. A total of $43$ unique teams registered for this shared task. Five teams participated in the Flat Fine-Grained Subtask, among which two teams tackled the Nested Fine-Grained Subtask and one team participated in the Open-Track NER Subtask. The winning teams achieved $F_1$ scores of $91%$ and $92%$ in the Flat Fine-Grained and Nested Fine-Grained Subtasks, respectively. The sole team in the Open-Track Subtask achieved an $F_1$ score of $73.7%$.

ACL 2024

WojoodNER 2024: The Second Arabic Named Entity Recognition Shared Task

flat ner.

arabic ner

wojoodner

nested ner

fine-grained

workshop paper

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The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

This paper presents our system ``muNERa'', submitted to the WojoodNER 2024 shared task at the second ArabicNLP conference. We participated in two subtasks, the flat and nested fine-grained NER sub-tasks (1 and 2). muNERa achieved first place in the nested NER sub-task and second place in the flat NER sub-task. The system is based on the TANL framework cite{paolini2021structured}, by using a sequence-to-sequence structured language translation approach to model both tasks. We utilize the pre-trained AraT5textsubscript{v2}-base model as the base model for the TANL framework. The best-performing muNERa model achieves 91.07% and 90.26% for the F-1 scores on the test sets for the nested and flat subtasks, respectively.

muNERa at WojoodNER 2024: Multi-tasking NER Approach

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a fundamental task in Natural Language Processing (NLP) that focuses on extracting entities such as names of people, organizations, locations, and dates from text. Despite significant advancements due to deep learning and transformer architectures like BERT, NER still faces challenges, particularly in low-resource languages like Arabic. This paper presents a BERT-based NER system that utilizes a two-channel parallel hybrid neural network with an attention mechanism specifically designed for the NER Shared Task 2024. In the competition, our approach ranked second by scoring 90.13% in micro-F1 on the test set. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of combining advanced neural network architectures with contextualized word embeddings in improving NER performance for Arabic.

Addax at WojoodNER 2024: Attention-Based Dual-Channel Neural Network for Arabic Named Entity Recognition

In this paper, we present our submission for the WojoodNER 2024 Shared Tasks addressing flat and nested sub-tasks (1, 2). We experiment with three different approaches. We train (i) an Arabic fine-tuned version of BLOOMZ-7b-mt, GEMMA-7b, and AraBERTv2 on multi-label token classifications task; (ii) two AraBERTv2 models, on main types and sub-types respectively; and (iii) one model for main types and four for the four sub-types. Based on the Wojood NER 2024 test set results, the three fine-tuned models performed similarly with AraBERTv2 favored (F1: Flat=.8780 Nested=.9040). The five model approach performed slightly better (F1: Flat=.8782 Nested=.9043).

DRU at WojoodNER 2024: A Multi-level Method Approach

This paper describes the approach and results of Bangor University’s participation in the WojoodNER 2024 shared task, specifically for Subtask-1: Closed-Track Flat Fine-Grain NER. We present a system utilizing a transformer-based model called bert-base-arabic-camelbert-mix, fine-tuned on the Wojood-Fine corpus. A key enhancement to our approach involves adding a linear layer on top of the bert-base-arabic-camelbert-mix to classify each token into one of 51 different entity types and subtypes, as well as the 'O' label for non-entity tokens. This linear layer effectively maps the contextualized embeddings produced by BERT to the desired output labels, addressing the complex challenges of fine-grained Arabic NER. The system achieved competitive results in precision, recall, and F1 scores, thereby contributing significant insights into the application of transformers in Arabic NER tasks.

Bangor University at WojoodNER 2024: Advancing Arabic Named Entity Recognition with CAMeLBERT-Mix

This paper details our submission to the WojoodNER Shared Task 2024, leveraging in-context learning with large language models for Arabic Named Entity Recognition. We utilized the Command R model, to perform fine-grained NER on the Wojood-Fine corpus. Our primary approach achieved an F1 score of 0.737 and a recall of 0.756. Post-processing the generated predictions to correct format inconsistencies resulted in an increased recall of 0.759, and a similar F1 score of 0.735. A multi-level prompting method and aggregation of outputs resulted in a lower F1 score of 0.637. Our results demonstrate the potential of ICL for Arabic NER while highlighting challenges related to LLM output consistency.

DRU at WojoodNER 2024: ICL LLM for Arabic NER

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a task in Natural Language Processing (NLP) that aims to identify and classify entities in text into predefined categories. However, when applied to Arabic data, NER encounters unique challenges stemming from the language's rich morphological inflections, absence of capitalization cues, and spelling variants, where a single word can comprise multiple morphemes. In this paper, we introduce Arabic KNN-NER, our submission to the Wojood NER Shared Task 2024 (ArabicNLP 2024). We have participated in the shared sub-task 1 Flat NER. In this shared sub-task, we tackle fine-grained flat-entity recognition for Arabic text, where we identify a single main entity and possibly zero or multiple sub-entities for each word. Arabic KNN-NER augments the probability distribution of a fine-tuned model with another label probability distribution derived from performing a KNN search over the cached training data. Our submission achieved 91% on the test set on the WojoodFine dataset, placing Arabic KNN-NER on top of the leaderboard for the shared task.

mucAI at WojoodNER 2024: Arabic Named Entity Recognition with Nearest Neighbor Search

Pre-trained language models have shown impressive abilities of understanding and generating natural languages. However, they typically inherit undesired human-like bias and stereotypes from training data, which raises concerns about putting these models into use in real-world scenarios. Although prior research has proposed to reduce bias using different fairness objectives, they usually fail to capture different representations of bias and, therefore, struggle with fully debiasing models. In this work, we introduce a multi-objective probability alignment approach to overcome current challenges by incorporating multiple debiasing losses to locate and penalize bias in different forms. Compared to existing methods, our proposed method can more effectively and comprehensively reduce stereotypical bias, and maintains the language ability of pre-trained models at the same time. Besides, we adopt prefix-tuning to optimize fairness objectives, and results show that it can achieve better bias removal than full fine-tuning while requiring much fewer computational resources. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/Ewanwong/debias_NLG.

A Parameter-Efficient Multi-Objective Approach to Mitigate Stereotypical Bias in Language Models

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have achieved success in various of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, PLMs also introduce some disquieting safety problems, such as gender bias. Gender bias is an extremely complex issue, because different individuals may hold disparate opinions on whether the same sentence expresses harmful bias, especially those seemingly neutral or positive. This paper first defines the concept of contextualized gender bias (CGB), which makes it easy to measure implicit gender bias in both PLMs and annotators. We then construct CGBDataset, which contains 20k natural sentences with gendered words, from Chinese news. Similar to the task of masked language models, gendered words are masked for PLMs and annotators to judge whether a male word or a female word is more suitable. Then, we introduce CGBFrame to measure the gender bias of annotators. By comparing the results measured by PLMs and annotators, we find that though there are differences on the choices made by PLMs and annotators, they show significant consistency in general.

Do PLMs and Annotators Share the Same Gender Bias? Definition, Dataset, and Framework of Contextualized Gender Bias

Gender Stereotypes refer to the widely held beliefs and assumptions about the typical traits, behaviours, and roles associated with a collective group of individuals of a particular gender in society. These typical beliefs about how people of a particular gender are described in text can cause harmful effects to individuals leading to unfair treatment. In this research, the aim is to identify the words and language constructs that can influence a text to be considered a gender stereotype. To do so, a transformer model with attention is fine-tuned for gender stereotype detection. Thereafter, words/language constructs used for the model's decision are identified using a combined use of attention- and SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations)-based explainable approaches. Results show that adjectives and verbs were highly influential in predicting gender stereotypes. Furthermore, applying sentiment analysis showed that words describing male gender stereotypes were more positive than those used for female gender stereotypes.

An Explainable Approach to Understanding Gender Stereotype Text

This study examines the fairness of human- and AI-generated summaries of student reflections in university STEM classes, focusing on potential gender biases. Using topic modeling, we first identify topics that are more prevalent in reflections from female students and others that are more common among male students. We then analyze whether human and AI-generated summaries reflect the concerns of students of any particular gender over others. Our analysis reveals that though human-generated and extractive AI summarization techniques do not show a clear bias, abstractive AI-generated summaries exhibit a bias towards male students. Pedagogical themes are over-represented from male reflections in these summaries, while concept-specific topics are under-represented from female reflections. This research contributes to a deeper understanding of AI-generated bias in educational contexts, highlighting the need for future work on mitigating these biases.

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