Hédi Zeghidi

Hédi Zeghidi, Ludovic Moncla

This paper evaluates Few-Shot Prompting with Large Language Models for Named Entity Recognition (NER). Traditional NER systems rely on extensive labeled datasets, which are costly and time-consuming to obtain. Few-Shot Prompting or in-context learning enables models to recognize entities with minimal examples. We assess state-of-the-art models like GPT-4 in NER tasks, comparing their few-shot performance to fully supervised benchmarks. Results show that while there is a performance gap, large models excel in adapting to new entity types and domains with very limited data. We also explore the effects of prompt engineering, guided output format and context length on performance. This study underscores Few-Shot Learning's potential to reduce the need for large labeled datasets, enhancing NER scalability and accessibility.

Ludovic Moncla, Hédi Zeghidi

Named Entity Recognition (NER) in historical texts presents unique challenges due to non-standardized language, archaic orthography, and nested or overlapping entities. This study benchmarks a diverse set of NER approaches, ranging from classical Conditional Random Fields (CRFs) and spaCy-based models to transformer-based architectures such as CamemBERT and sequence-labeling models like Flair. Experiments are conducted on the GeoEDdA dataset, a richly annotated corpus derived from 18th-century French encyclopedias. We propose framing NER as both token-level and span-level classification to accommodate complex nested entity structures typical of historical documents. Additionally, we evaluate the emerging potential of few-shot prompting with generative language models for low-resource scenarios. Our results demonstrate that while transformer-based models achieve state-of-the-art performance, especially on nested entities, generative models offer promising alternatives when labeled data are scarce. The study highlights ongoing challenges in historical NER and suggests avenues for hybrid approaches combining symbolic and neural methods to better capture the intricacies of early modern French text.