Abstract & Overview
Few-shot named entity recognition (NER) systems aim at recognizing novel-class named entities based on only a few labeled examples.In this paper, we present a decomposed metalearning approach which addresses the problem of few-shot NER by sequentially tackling fewshot span detection and few-shot entity typing using meta-learning.In particular, we take the few-shot span detection as a sequence labeling problem and train the span detector by introducing the model-agnostic meta-learning (MAML) algorithm to find a good model parameter initialization that could fast adapt to new entity classes.For few-shot entity typing, we propose MAML-ProtoNet, i.e., MAML-enhanced prototypical networks to find a good embedding space that can better distinguish text span representations from different entity classes.Extensive experiments on various benchmarks show that our approach achieves superior performance over prior methods. 1