Papers › CONTaiNER: Few-Shot Named Entity Recognition via Contrastive Learning
CONTaiNER: Few-Shot Named Entity Recognition via Contrastive Learning
Sarkar Snigdha Sarathi Das, Arzoo Katiyar, Rebecca J. Passonneau, Rui Zhang
Named Entity Recognition (NER) in Few-Shot setting is imperative for entity tagging in low resource domains. Existing approaches only learn class-specific semantic features and intermediate representations from source domains. This affects generalizability to unseen target domains, resulting in suboptimal performances. To this end, we present CONTaiNER, a novel contrastive learning technique that optimizes the inter-token distribution distance for Few-Shot NER. Instead of optimizing class-specific attributes, CONTaiNER optimizes a generalized objective of differentiating between token categories based on their Gaussian-distributed embeddings. This effectively alleviates overfitting issues originating from training domains. Our experiments in several traditional test domains (OntoNotes, CoNLL'03, WNUT '17, GUM) and a new large scale Few-Shot NER dataset (Few-NERD) demonstrate that on average, CONTaiNER outperforms previous methods by 3%-13% absolute F1 points while showing consistent performance trends, even in challenging scenarios where previous approaches could not achieve appreciable performance.
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="2109.07589")
Code
Syntology Ran 0 of 5 code samples harvested from 1 repository linked to this paper; 5 have no recorded run.
By repository: official repository: 5 samples from 1 repository, 0 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; 0 ran; 0 honoured the contract we drafted; 5 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: 0 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 psunlpgroup/container. “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.
5cce77f5781d6ef6 · report
5c8c4a2b8ca7176f · report
e023fe74e0952252 · report
a99a54e61796f3a9 · report
b0c5474e5dc4f45f · report
Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Few-shot NER | Few-NERD (INTER) | CONTaiNER | 10 way 1~2 shot | 48.35 | #10 of 13 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Few-shot NER | Few-NERD (INTER) | CONTaiNER | 10 way 5~10 shot | 57.12 | #10 of 13 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Few-shot NER | Few-NERD (INTER) | CONTaiNER | 5 way 1~2 shot | 55.95 | #10 of 13 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Few-shot NER | Few-NERD (INTER) | CONTaiNER | 5 way 5~10 shot | 61.83 | #10 of 13 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Few-shot NER | Few-NERD (INTRA) | CONTaiNER | 10 way 1~2 shot | 33.84 | #9 of 13 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Few-shot NER | Few-NERD (INTRA) | CONTaiNER | 10 way 5~10 shot | 47.49 | #9 of 13 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Few-shot NER | Few-NERD (INTRA) | CONTaiNER | 5 way 1~2 shot | 40.43 | #9 of 13 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Few-shot NER | Few-NERD (INTRA) | CONTaiNER | 5 way 5~10 shot | 53.70 | #9 of 13 | 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.
Methods
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