Robust Few-Shot Named Entity Recognition with Boundary Discrimination and Correlation Purification

Abstract

Few-shot named entity recognition (NER) aims to recognize novel named entities in low-resource domains utilizing existing knowledge. However, the present few-shot NER models assume that the labeled data are all clean without noise or outliers, and there are few works focusing on the robustness of the cross-domain transfer learning ability to textual adversarial attacks in few-shot NER. In this work, we comprehensively explore and assess the robustness of few-shot NER models under textual adversarial attack scenario, and found the vulnerability of existing few-shot NER models. Furthermore, we propose a robust two-stage few-shot NER method with Boundary Discrimination and Correlation Purification (BDCP). Specifically, in the span detection stage, the entity boundary discriminative module is introduced to provide a highly distinguishing boundary representation space to detect entity spans. In the entity typing stage, the correlations between entities and contexts are purified by minimizing the interference information and facilitating correlation generalization to alleviate the perturbations caused by textual adversarial attacks. In addition, we construct adversarial examples for few-shot NER based on public datasets Few-NERD and Cross-Dataset. Comprehensive evaluations on those two groups of few-shot NER datasets containing adversarial examples demonstrate the robustness and superiority of the proposed method.