Using an LLM to Tackle Difficult Cases in NER for Nepali Tweets

Claire Wang

Named entity recognition (NER) is challenging for social media data in a low-resource language. LLMs often lag behind pretrained language models (PLMs) in NER performance, but they show promise in handling cases that PLMs struggle with. Using a dataset of Nepali tweets, we split the test set into "easy" and "hard" cases using token probabilities from a fine-tuned pretrained language model (PLM). We then evaluate an LLM on the hard test cases using 16 different prompt configurations. We find that selecting examples based on semantic similarity and increasing the number of examples improves F1 score by almost 10 points from the baseline configuration. Although the LLM underperforms the PLM on the full and easy test sets, it surpasses the PLM on the hard test set, resulting in an improved score when the two models are combined.