# MProto: Multi-Prototype Network with Denoised Optimal Transport for Distantly Supervised Named Entity Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.08298 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08298/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Oct 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Prototypical Networks for Few-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.05175/) (2017)
- [Sinkhorn Distances: Lightspeed Computation of Optimal Transportation Distances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.0895/) (2013)
- [BioBERT: a pre-trained biomedical language representation model for biomedical text mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08746/) (2019)
- [Neural Architectures for Named Entity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.01360/) (2016)
- [Bidirectional LSTM-CRF Models for Sequence Tagging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.01991/) (2015)
- [Unified Structure Generation for Universal Information Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12277/) (2022)
- [End-to-End Relation Extraction using LSTMs on Sequences and Tree Structures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1601.00770/) (2016)
- [Named Entity Recognition as Dependency Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.07150/) (2020)
- [A Unified Generative Framework for Various NER Subtasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01223/) (2021)
- [BOND: BERT-Assisted Open-Domain Named Entity Recognition with Distant Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.15509/) (2020)
- [Deep Joint Entity Disambiguation with Local Neural Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04920/) (2017)
- [Learning Named Entity Tagger using Domain-Specific Dictionary](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.03599/) (2018)
- [Few-shot classification in Named Entity Recognition Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.06158/) (2018)
- [Locate and Label: A Two-stage Identifier for Nested Named Entity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06804/) (2021)
- [Distantly Supervised Named Entity Recognition using Positive-Unlabeled Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01378/) (2019)
- [Distantly-Supervised Named Entity Recognition with Noise-Robust Learning and Language Model Augmented Self-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05003/) (2021)
- [A Sequence-to-Set Network for Nested Named Entity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08901/) (2021)
- [Empirical Analysis of Unlabeled Entity Problem in Named Entity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.05426/) (2020)
- [Prototypical Representation Learning for Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11647/) (2021)
- [A Trigger-Sense Memory Flow Framework for Joint Entity and Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10213/) (2021)
- [De-biasing Distantly Supervised Named Entity Recognition via Causal Intervention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09233/) (2021)
- [Learning from Miscellaneous Other-Class Words for Few-shot Named Entity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15167/) (2021)
- [Distantly Supervised Named Entity Recognition via Confidence-Based Multi-Class Positive and Unlabeled Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.09589/) (2022)
- [Parallel Instance Query Network for Named Entity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10545/) (2022)
- [PromptNER: Prompt Locating and Typing for Named Entity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17104/) (2023)
- [Rethinking Negative Sampling for Handling Missing Entity Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11607/) (2021)
- [Improving Distantly-Supervised Named Entity Recognition with Self-Collaborative Denoising Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04429/) (2021)
- [Denoising Distantly Supervised Named Entity Recognition via a Hypergeometric Probabilistic Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09234/) (2021)
- [Propose-and-Refine: A Two-Stage Set Prediction Network for Nested Named Entity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12732/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Re-Examine Distantly Supervised NER: A New Benchmark and a Simple Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14948/) (2024)
- [DynClean: Training Dynamics-based Label Cleaning for Distantly-Supervised Named Entity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04616/) (2025)
- [Noise-Robustness Through Noise: A Framework combining Asymmetric LoRA with Poisoning MoE](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23868/) (2025)
- [Coupling Local Context and Global Semantic Prototypes via a Hierarchical Architecture for Rhetorical Roles Labeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.03856/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Distantly supervised named entity recognition (DS-NER) aims to locate entity mentions and classify their types with only knowledge bases or gazetteers and unlabeled corpus. However, distant annotations are noisy and degrade the performance of NER models. In this paper, we propose a noise-robust prototype network named MProto for the DS-NER task. Different from previous prototype-based NER methods, MProto represents each entity type with multiple prototypes to characterize the intra-class variance among entity representations. To optimize the classifier, each token should be assigned an appropriate ground-truth prototype and we consider such token-prototype assignment as an optimal transport (OT) problem. Furthermore, to mitigate the noise from incomplete labeling, we propose a novel denoised optimal transport (DOT) algorithm. Specifically, we utilize the assignment result between Other class tokens and all prototypes to distinguish unlabeled entity tokens from true negatives. Experiments on several DS-NER benchmarks demonstrate that our MProto achieves state-of-the-art performance. The source code is now available on Github.