UC3M-PUCPR at SemEval-2022 Task 11: An Ensemble Method of Transformer-based Models for Complex Named Entity Recognition

Abstract

This study introduces the system submitted to the SemEval 2022 Task 11: MultiCoNER (Multilingual Complex Named Entity Recognition) by the UC3M-PUCPR team. We proposed an ensemble of transformer-based models for entity recognition in cross-domain texts. Our deep learning method benefits from the transformer architecture, which adopts the attention mechanism to handle the long-range dependencies of the input text. Also, the ensemble approach for named entity recognition (NER) improved the results over baselines based on individual models on two of the three tracks we participated in. The ensemble model for the code-mixed task achieves an overall performance of 76.36% F1-score, a 2.85 percentage point increase upon our individually best model for this task, XLM-RoBERTa-large (73.51%), outperforming the baseline provided for the shared task by 18.26 points. Our preliminary results suggest that contextualized language models ensembles can, even if modestly, improve the results in extracting information from unstructured data.