Papers › Universal NER: A Gold-Standard Multilingual Named Entity Recognition Benchmark

Universal NER: A Gold-Standard Multilingual Named Entity Recognition Benchmark

15 Nov 2023arXiv 2023 11arXiv:2311.09122archive 2025-07-28

Stephen Mayhew, Terra Blevins, Shuheng Liu, Marek Šuppa, Hila Gonen, Joseph Marvin Imperial, Börje F. Karlsson, Peiqin Lin, Nikola Ljubešić, LJ Miranda, Barbara Plank, Arij Riabi, Yuval Pinter

We introduce Universal NER (UNER), an open, community-driven project to develop gold-standard NER benchmarks in many languages. The overarching goal of UNER is to provide high-quality, cross-lingually consistent annotations to facilitate and standardize multilingual NER research. UNER v1 contains 18 datasets annotated with named entities in a cross-lingual consistent schema across 12 diverse languages. In this paper, we detail the dataset creation and composition of UNER; we also provide initial modeling baselines on both in-language and cross-lingual learning settings. We release the data, code, and fitted models to the public.

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Code

opennlg/openba-v2 mentioned on GitHubpytorchApache-2.0 report

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Tasks

Cross-Lingual NERMultilingual Named Entity RecognitionNERNamed Entity RecognitionNamed Entity Recognition (NER)named-entity-recognition

Datasets

Introduced by this paper, per the archive.

UNER v1

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Cross-Lingual NER UNER v1 (Cebuano) UNER XML-R (all) F1 (micro) 69.6 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Cross-Lingual NER UNER v1 (Chinese Simplified) UNER XML-R (all) F1 (micro) 87.7 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Cross-Lingual NER UNER v1 (Chinese) UNER XML-R (all) F1 (micro) 88.2 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Cross-Lingual NER UNER v1 (Croatian) UNER XML-R (all) F1 (micro) 90.9 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Cross-Lingual NER UNER v1 (Danish) UNER XML-R (all) F1 (micro) 83.0 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Cross-Lingual NER UNER v1 (English) UNER XML-R (all) F1 (micro) 82.8 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Cross-Lingual NER UNER v1 (Portuguese) UNER XML-R (all) F1 (micro) 82.3 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Cross-Lingual NER UNER v1 (Serbian) UNER XML-R (all) F1 (micro) 95.2 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Cross-Lingual NER UNER v1 (Slovak) UNER XML-R (all) F1 (micro) 81.6 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Cross-Lingual NER UNER v1 (Swedish) UNER XML-R (all) F1 (micro) 88.2 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Cross-Lingual NER UNER v1 (Tagalog T) UNER XML-R (all) F1 (micro) 91.3 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Cross-Lingual NER UNER v1 (Tagalog U) UNER XML-R (all) F1 (micro) 63.8 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Cross-Lingual NER UNER v1 - PUD (Chinese) UNER XML-R (all) F1 (micro) 86.0 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Cross-Lingual NER UNER v1 - PUD (English) UNER XML-R (all) F1 (micro) 79.5 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Cross-Lingual NER UNER v1 - PUD (German) UNER XML-R (all) F1 (micro) 78.9 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Cross-Lingual NER UNER v1 - PUD (Portuguese) UNER XML-R (all) F1 (micro) 85.1 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Cross-Lingual NER UNER v1 - PUD (Russian) UNER XML-R (all) F1 (micro) 70.6 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Cross-Lingual NER UNER v1 - PUD (Swedish) UNER XML-R (all) F1 (micro) 85.3 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Named Entity Recognition (NER) UNER v1 (Chinese Simplified) UNER XML-R F1 (micro) 89.40 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Named Entity Recognition (NER) UNER v1 (Chinese) UNER XML-R F1 (micro) 89.50 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Named Entity Recognition (NER) UNER v1 (Croatian) UNER XML-R F1 (micro) 93.60 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Named Entity Recognition (NER) UNER v1 (Danish) UNER XML-R F1 (micro) 82.70 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Named Entity Recognition (NER) UNER v1 (English) UNER XML-R F1 (micro) 86.00 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Named Entity Recognition (NER) UNER v1 (Portuguese) UNER XML-R F1 (micro) 90.4 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Named Entity Recognition (NER) UNER v1 (Serbian) UNER XML-R F1 (micro) 94.70 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Named Entity Recognition (NER) UNER v1 (Slovak) UNER XML-R F1 (micro) 85.50 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Named Entity Recognition (NER) UNER v1 (Swedish) UNER XML-R F1 (micro) 88.30 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Named Entity Recognition (NER) UNER v1 - PUD (Chinese) UNER XML-R F1 (micro) 87.10 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Named Entity Recognition (NER) UNER v1 - PUD (English) UNER XML-R F1 (micro) 80.10 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Named Entity Recognition (NER) UNER v1 - PUD (Portuguese) UNER XML-R F1 (micro) 88.80 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Named Entity Recognition (NER) UNER v1 - PUD (Swedish) UNER XML-R F1 (micro) 82.20 #1 of 1 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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