# Enhancing Hindi NER in Low Context: A Comparative study of Transformer-based models with vs. without Retrieval Augmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.16002 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.16002/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [QLoRA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14314/) (2023)
- [HuggingFace's Transformers: State-of-the-art Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03771/) (2019)
- [SentencePiece: A simple and language independent subword tokenizer and detokenizer for Neural Text Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06226/) (2018)
- [Google's Neural Machine Translation System: Bridging the Gap between Human and Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.08144/) (2016)
- [XTREME: A Massively Multilingual Multi-task Benchmark for Evaluating Cross-lingual Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.11080/) (2020)
- [Bidirectional LSTM-CRF Models for Sequence Tagging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.01991/) (2015)
- [Is ChatGPT a General-Purpose Natural Language Processing Task Solver?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.06476/) (2023)
- [ChatGPT Beyond English: Towards a Comprehensive Evaluation of Large Language Models in Multilingual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05613/) (2023)
- [GLiNER: Generalist Model for Named Entity Recognition using Bidirectional Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08526/) (2023)
- [Empirical Study of Zero-Shot NER with ChatGPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10035/) (2023)
- [DAMO-NLP at SemEval-2022 Task 11: A Knowledge-based System for Multilingual Named Entity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00545/) (2022)
- [HiNER: A Large Hindi Named Entity Recognition Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13743/) (2022)
- [USTC-NELSLIP at SemEval-2022 Task 11: Gazetteer-Adapted Integration Network for Multilingual Complex Named Entity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03216/) (2022)
- [PromptDA: Label-guided Data Augmentation for Prompt-based Few-shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09229/) (2022)
- [The Exploration of Knowledge-Preserving Prompts for Document Summarisation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11719/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

One major challenge in natural language processing is named entity recognition (NER), which identifies and categorises named entities in textual input. In order to improve NER, this study investigates a Hindi NER technique that makes use of Hindi-specific pretrained encoders (MuRIL and XLM-R) and Generative Models ( Llama-2-7B-chat-hf (Llama2-7B), Llama-2-70B-chat-hf (Llama2-70B), Llama-3-70B-Instruct (Llama3-70B) and GPT3.5-turbo), and augments the data with retrieved data from external relevant contexts, notably from Wikipedia. We have fine-tuned MuRIL, XLM-R and Llama2-7B with and without RA. However, Llama2-70B, lama3-70B and GPT3.5-turbo are utilised for few-shot NER generation. Our investigation shows that the mentioned language models (LMs) with Retrieval Augmentation (RA) outperform baseline methods that don't incorporate RA in most cases. The macro F1 scores for MuRIL and XLM-R are 0.69 and 0.495, respectively, without RA and increase to 0.70 and 0.71, respectively, in the presence of RA. Fine-tuned Llama2-7B outperforms Llama2-7B by a significant margin. On the other hand the generative models which are not fine-tuned also perform better with augmented data. GPT3.5-turbo adopted RA well; however, Llama2-70B and llama3-70B did not adopt RA with our retrieval context. The findings show that RA significantly improves performance, especially for low-context data. This study adds significant knowledge about how best to use data augmentation methods and pretrained models to enhance NER performance, particularly in languages with limited resources.
