VicunaNER: Zero/Few-shot Named Entity Recognition using Vicuna

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs, e.g., ChatGPT) have shown impressive zero- and few-shot capabilities in Named Entity Recognition (NER). However, these models can only be accessed via online APIs, which may cause data leak and non-reproducible problems. In this paper, we propose VicunaNER, a zero/few-shot NER framework based on the newly released open-source LLM -- Vicuna. VicunaNER is a two-phase framework, where each phase leverages multi-turn dialogues with Vicuna to recognize entities from texts. We name the second phase as Re-Recognition, which recognizes those entities not recognized in the first phase (a.k.a. Recognition). Moreover, we set entity correctness check dialogues in each phase to filter out wrong entities. We evaluate VicunaNER's zero-shot capacity on 10 datasets crossing 5 domains and few-shot capacity on Few-NERD. Experimental results demonstrate that VicunaNER achieves superior performance in both shot settings. Additionally, we conduct comprehensive investigations on Vicuna from multiple perspectives.