CLaC at SemEval-2023 Task 2: Comparing Span-Prediction and Sequence-Labeling approaches for NER

Abstract

This paper summarizes the CLaC submission for the MultiCoNER 2 task which concerns the recognition of complex, fine-grained named entities. We compare two popular approaches for NER, namely Sequence Labeling and Span Prediction. We find that our best Span Prediction system performs slightly better than our best Sequence Labeling system on test data. Moreover, we find that using the larger version of XLM RoBERTa significantly improves performance. Post-competition experiments show that Span Prediction and Sequence Labeling approaches improve when they use special input tokens ( and) of XLM-RoBERTa. The code for training all models, preprocessing, and post-processing is available at this Github repo.