Daily Papers

Information extraction tasks require both accurate, efficient, and generalisable models. Classical supervised deep learning approaches can achieve the required performance, but they need large datasets and are limited in their ability to adapt to different tasks. On the other hand, large language models (LLMs) demonstrate good generalization, meaning that they can adapt to many different tasks based on user requests. However, LLMs are computationally expensive and tend to fail to generate structured outputs. In this article, we will introduce a new kind of GLiNER model that can be used for various information extraction tasks while being a small encoder model. Our model achieved SoTA performance on zero-shot NER benchmarks and leading performance on question-answering, summarization and relation extraction tasks. Additionally, in this article, we will cover experimental results on self-learning approaches for named entity recognition using GLiNER models.

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is essential in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications. Traditional NER models are effective but limited to a set of predefined entity types. In contrast, Large Language Models (LLMs) can extract arbitrary entities through natural language instructions, offering greater flexibility. However, their size and cost, particularly for those accessed via APIs like ChatGPT, make them impractical in resource-limited scenarios. In this paper, we introduce a compact NER model trained to identify any type of entity. Leveraging a bidirectional transformer encoder, our model, GLiNER, facilitates parallel entity extraction, an advantage over the slow sequential token generation of LLMs. Through comprehensive testing, GLiNER demonstrate strong performance, outperforming both ChatGPT and fine-tuned LLMs in zero-shot evaluations on various NER benchmarks.

Biomedical named entity recognition (NER) presents unique challenges due to specialized vocabularies, the sheer volume of entities, and the continuous emergence of novel entities. Traditional NER models, constrained by fixed taxonomies and human annotations, struggle to generalize beyond predefined entity types or efficiently adapt to emerging concepts. To address these issues, we introduce GLiNER-biomed, a domain-adapted suite of Generalist and Lightweight Model for NER (GLiNER) models specifically tailored for biomedical NER. In contrast to conventional approaches, GLiNER uses natural language descriptions to infer arbitrary entity types, enabling zero-shot recognition. Our approach first distills the annotation capabilities of large language models (LLMs) into a smaller, more efficient model, enabling the generation of high-coverage synthetic biomedical NER data. We subsequently train two GLiNER architectures, uni- and bi-encoder, at multiple scales to balance computational efficiency and recognition performance. Evaluations on several biomedical datasets demonstrate that GLiNER-biomed outperforms state-of-the-art GLiNER models in both zero- and few-shot scenarios, achieving 5.96% improvement in F1-score over the strongest baseline. Ablation studies highlight the effectiveness of our synthetic data generation strategy and emphasize the complementary benefits of synthetic biomedical pre-training combined with fine-tuning on high-quality general-domain annotations. All datasets, models, and training pipelines are publicly available at https://github.com/ds4dh/GLiNER-biomed.

Information extraction (IE) is fundamental to numerous NLP applications, yet existing solutions often require specialized models for different tasks or rely on computationally expensive large language models. We present GLiNER2, a unified framework that enhances the original GLiNER architecture to support named entity recognition, text classification, and hierarchical structured data extraction within a single efficient model. Built pretrained transformer encoder architecture, GLiNER2 maintains CPU efficiency and compact size while introducing multi-task composition through an intuitive schema-based interface. Our experiments demonstrate competitive performance across extraction and classification tasks with substantial improvements in deployment accessibility compared to LLM-based alternatives. We release GLiNER2 as an open-source pip-installable library with pre-trained models and documentation at https://github.com/fastino-ai/GLiNER2.

We present GliLem -- a novel hybrid lemmatization system for Estonian that enhances the highly accurate rule-based morphological analyzer Vabamorf with an external disambiguation module based on GliNER -- an open vocabulary NER model that is able to match text spans with text labels in natural language. We leverage the flexibility of a pre-trained GliNER model to improve the lemmatization accuracy of Vabamorf by 10\% compared to its original disambiguation module and achieve an improvement over the token classification-based baseline. To measure the impact of improvements in lemmatization accuracy on the information retrieval downstream task, we first created an information retrieval dataset for Estonian by automatically translating the DBpedia-Entity dataset from English. We benchmark several token normalization approaches, including lemmatization, on the created dataset using the BM25 algorithm. We observe a substantial improvement in IR metrics when using lemmatization over simplistic stemming. The benefits of improving lemma disambiguation accuracy manifest in small but consistent improvement in the IR recall measure, especially in the setting of high k.