Papers › A Sequence-to-Set Network for Nested Named Entity Recognition
A Sequence-to-Set Network for Nested Named Entity Recognition
Zeqi Tan, Yongliang Shen, Shuai Zhang, Weiming Lu, Yueting Zhuang
Named entity recognition (NER) is a widely studied task in natural language processing. Recently, a growing number of studies have focused on the nested NER. The span-based methods, considering the entity recognition as a span classification task, can deal with nested entities naturally. But they suffer from the huge search space and the lack of interactions between entities. To address these issues, we propose a novel sequence-to-set neural network for nested NER. Instead of specifying candidate spans in advance, we provide a fixed set of learnable vectors to learn the patterns of the valuable spans. We utilize a non-autoregressive decoder to predict the final set of entities in one pass, in which we are able to capture dependencies between entities. Compared with the sequence-to-sequence method, our model is more suitable for such unordered recognition task as it is insensitive to the label order. In addition, we utilize the loss function based on bipartite matching to compute the overall training loss. Experimental results show that our proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on three nested NER corpora: ACE 2004, ACE 2005 and KBP 2017. The code is available at https://github.com/zqtan1024/sequence-to-set.
In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.
For agents, Syntology's MCP tool lists every function and class Syntology harvested from this paper and whether it ran (how to connect): get_harvested_code_for_paper(arxiv_id="2105.08901")
Code
Syntology Ran 5 of 5 code samples harvested from 1 repository linked to this paper; 0 have no recorded run. Of those that ran: 1 ran · our draft was wrong; 4 ran with no contract checked.
By repository: official repository: 5 samples from 1 repository, 5 ran. The run record, sample by sample. “Ran” means executed on a synthesized input, not that the code is correct or reproduces the paper.
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
5 samples harvested; 5 ran; 0 honoured the contract we drafted; 0 have no recorded run. Read from Syntology's graph 2026-09-24; that is when this build read the record, not when the samples ran.
Licence: 5 of the 5 samples are pointer only, meaning Syntology does not serve that copy's text. This page shows no code text for any sample; each one links to its file in the repository.
Harvested from zqtan1024/sequence-to-set. “Ran” means the sample executed on a synthesized input. It does not mean the output is correct, and nothing here reproduces the paper's results. “Honoured” and “violated” refer to a contract Syntology drafted from the code itself; “our draft was wrong” and “fixture could not drive it” are failures of Syntology's instrument, not of the code.
Each sample ends with its code_sha256, Syntology's identity for that exact code. An agent fetches the stored sample with Syntology's MCP tool get_code(code_sha256="…") (how to connect); click an identity to copy that call.
Repository labels, per sample. official repository: The archive marks this repository official for the paper. named in the paper: The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official. community (archive-listed): In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper. found in paper text by Syntology: Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted. community: Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested. Samples from a repository marked official are listed first. Licence labels name the repository's licence as recorded at harvest. “Pointer only” means Syntology does not serve that copy's text, for one of four reasons: no licence file was found; the licence was not identified; the licence is recorded as permissive but that copy's record is not marked cleared; or the licence is outside the permissive list Syntology serves text under (MIT, Apache-2.0, BSD and similar). Some licences outside that list permit redistribution, such as WTFPL, and GPL-3.0 under its conditions; they are simply not on the list. Hover a licence label for the reason. File links open the file on GitHub at the default branch, which may have changed since the harvest.
c35062d8b39996bb · report
0d5cc2bbce3633e1 · report
96f6e07bef50faf5 · report
3dbc99b666f51595 · report
4679ba1db55b79b8 · report
Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nested Named Entity Recognition | ACE 2004 | Sequence-to-Set | F1 | 87.26 | #13 of 24 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Nested Named Entity Recognition | ACE 2005 | Sequence-to-Set | F1 | 87.05 | #6 of 25 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Nested Named Entity Recognition | GENIA | Sequence-to-Set | F1 | 80.44 | #9 of 26 | Archive leaderboard | report |
Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections