mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

kNN-NER: Named Entity Recognition with Nearest Neighbor Search

arXiv 2203.17103 ↗First posted 31 Mar 2022cs.CLcited by 6

On the map: Retrieval-augmented generation → Generation and context integration

Abstract (arXiv)

Inspired by recent advances in retrieval augmented methods in NLP~citepkhandelwal2019generalization,khandelwal2020nearest,meng2021gnn, in this paper, we introduce a k nearest neighbor NER (kNN-NER) framework, which augments the distribution of entity labels by assigning k nearest neighbors retrieved from the training set. This strategy makes the model more capable of handling long-tail cases, along with better few-shot learning abilities. kNN-NER requires no additional operation during the training phase, and by interpolating k nearest neighbors search into the vanilla NER model, kNN-NER consistently outperforms its vanilla counterparts: we achieve a new state-of-the-art F1-score of 72.03 (+1.25) on the Chinese Weibo dataset and improved results on a variety of widely used NER benchmarks. Additionally, we show that kNN-NER can achieve comparable results to the vanilla NER model with 40% less amount of training data. Code available at urlhttps://github.com/ShannonAI/KNN-NER.

Key facts. Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Generation and context integration, one of 15 directions in Retrieval-augmented generation. Builds on 26 of its 46 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 31 Mar 2022.

Builds on

26 of 46 references.

Closest ancestors · 2

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2020Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks22 May
  2. 2020REALM: Retrieval-Augmented Language Model Pre-Training10 Feb

Other references · 24

  1. 2018BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understandingcited by 40,204
  2. 2019RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approachcited by 13,266
  3. 2020Approximate Nearest Neighbor Negative Contrastive Learning for Dense Text Retrievalcited by 846
  4. 2019Generalization through Memorization: Nearest Neighbor Language Modelscited by 788
  5. 2016Neural Architectures for Named Entity Recognitioncited by 548
  6. 2016End-to-end Sequence Labeling via Bi-directional LSTM-CNNs-CRFcited by 341
  7. 2020Nearest Neighbor Machine Translationcited by 209
  8. 2015Named Entity Recognition with Bidirectional LSTM-CNNscited by 201
  9. 2019A Unified MRC Framework for Named Entity Recognitioncited by 199
  10. 2019Dice Loss for Data-imbalanced NLP Taskscited by 180
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12 more
  1. 2021BertGCN: Transductive Text Classification by Combining GCN and BERTcited by 74
  2. 2021ChineseBERT: Chinese Pretraining Enhanced by Glyph and Pinyin Informationcited by 65
  3. 2020Augmenting Transformers with KNN-Based Composite Memory for Dialoguecited by 53
  4. 2021Fast Nearest Neighbor Machine Translationcited by 37
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  6. 2017Empower Sequence Labeling with Task-Aware Neural Language Modelcited by 28
  7. 2021GNN-LM: Language Modeling based on Global Contexts via GNNcited by 27
  8. 2019Hierarchically-Refined Label Attention Network for Sequence Labelingcited by 25
  9. 2019GCDT: A Global Context Enhanced Deep Transition Architecture for Sequence Labelingcited by 22
  10. 2021Dependency Parsing as MRC-based Span-Span Predictioncited by 13
  11. 2018Hybrid semi-Markov CRF for Neural Sequence Labelingcited by 9
  12. 2021Faster Nearest Neighbor Machine Translationcited by 8

Built on by

Cited by year

Citing papers per year: 2022: 3; 2023: 1; 2024: 1; 2025: 1.

6 papers.

  1. 2022Schema-aware Reference as Prompt Improves Data-Efficient Knowledge Graph Constructioncited by 6
  2. 2024FsPONER: Few-shot Prompt Optimization for Named Entity Recognition in Domain-specific Scenarioscited by 6
  3. 2023Federated Nearest Neighbor Machine Translationcited by 5
  4. 2022YATO: Yet Another deep learning based Text analysis Open toolkitcited by 2
  5. 2022End-to-End Entity Detection with Proposer and Regressorcited by 0
  6. 2025Label Distribution Learning-Enhanced Dual-KNN for Text Classificationcited by 0

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026NE-R1: Enhancing Named Entity Recognition Model via Reinforcement Learning
  2. 2021Distantly-Supervised Named Entity Recognition with Noise-Robust Learning and Language Model Augmented Self-Training
  3. 2024Learning Robust Named Entity Recognizers From Noisy Data With Retrieval Augmentation
  4. 2023Self-Improving for Zero-Shot Named Entity Recognition with Large Language Models
  5. 2024Improving Few-Shot Cross-Domain Named Entity Recognition by Instruction Tuning a Word-Embedding based Retrieval Augmented Large Language Model
  6. 2024Rethinking Negative Instances for Generative Named Entity Recognition
  7. 2024ReverseNER: A Self-Generated Example-Driven Framework for Zero-Shot Named Entity Recognition with Large Language Models
  8. 2023DAMO-NLP at SemEval-2023 Task 2: A Unified Retrieval-augmented System for Multilingual Named Entity Recognition