Papers › PromptNER: Prompting For Named Entity Recognition
PromptNER: Prompting For Named Entity Recognition
Dhananjay Ashok, Zachary C. Lipton
In a surprising turn, Large Language Models (LLMs) together with a growing arsenal of prompt-based heuristics now offer powerful off-the-shelf approaches providing few-shot solutions to myriad classic NLP problems. However, despite promising early results, these LLM-based few-shot methods remain far from the state of the art in Named Entity Recognition (NER), where prevailing methods include learning representations via end-to-end structural understanding and fine-tuning on standard labeled corpora. In this paper, we introduce PromptNER, a new state-of-the-art algorithm for few-Shot and cross-domain NER. To adapt to any new NER task PromptNER requires a set of entity definitions in addition to the standard few-shot examples. Given a sentence, PromptNER prompts an LLM to produce a list of potential entities along with corresponding explanations justifying their compatibility with the provided entity type definitions. Remarkably, PromptNER achieves state-of-the-art performance on few-shot NER, achieving a 4% (absolute) improvement in F1 score on the ConLL dataset, a 9% (absolute) improvement on the GENIA dataset, and a 4% (absolute) improvement on the FewNERD dataset. PromptNER also moves the state of the art on Cross Domain NER, outperforming prior methods (including those not limited to the few-shot setting), setting a new mark on 3/5 CrossNER target domains, with an average F1 gain of 3%, despite using less than 2% of the available data.
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Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zero-shot Named Entity Recognition (NER) | CrossNER | ChatGPT | AI | 40.7 | #4 of 4 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Zero-shot Named Entity Recognition (NER) | CrossNER | ChatGPT | Literature | 21.3 | #4 of 4 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Zero-shot Named Entity Recognition (NER) | CrossNER | ChatGPT | Music | 24.5 | #4 of 4 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Zero-shot Named Entity Recognition (NER) | CrossNER | ChatGPT | Politics | 20.3 | #4 of 4 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Zero-shot Named Entity Recognition (NER) | CrossNER | ChatGPT | Science | 40.6 | #4 of 4 | 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.
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