UseClean: Learning from complex noisy labels in named entity recognition

We investigate and refine denoising methods for NER task on data that potentially contains extremely noisy labels from multi-sources. In this paper, we first summarized all possible noise types and noise generation schemes, based on which we built a thorough evaluation system. We then pinpoint the bottleneck of current state-of-art denoising methods using our evaluation system. Correspondingly, we propose several refinements, including using a twostage framework to avoid error accumulation; a novel confidence score utilizing minimal clean supervision to increase predictive power; an automatic cutoff fitting to save extensive hyperparameter tuning; a warm started weighted partial CRF to better learn on the noisy tokens. Additionally, we propose to use adaptive sampling to further boost the performance in long-tailed entity settings. Our method improves F1 score by on average at least 5 ∼ 10% over current state-of-art across extensive experiments.