# ESNERA: Empirical and semantic named entity alignment for named entity dataset merging

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06877 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06877/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [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)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [Neural Architectures for Named Entity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.01360/) (2016)
- [Pseudo-Labeling and Confirmation Bias in Deep Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02983/) (2019)
- [Sentence-T5: Scalable Sentence Encoders from Pre-trained Text-to-Text Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08877/) (2021)
- [End-to-end Sequence Labeling via Bi-directional LSTM-CNNs-CRF](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.01354/) (2016)
- [Few-NERD: A Few-Shot Named Entity Recognition Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.07464/) (2021)
- [A Systematic Study and Comprehensive Evaluation of ChatGPT on Benchmark Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18486/) (2023)
- [FiNER: Financial Numeric Entity Recognition for XBRL Tagging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06482/) (2022)
- [Weight and Gradient Centralization in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.00866/) (2020)
- [A Survey on Arabic Named Entity Recognition: Past, Recent Advances, and Future Trends](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03512/) (2023)
- [Joining datasets via data augmentation in the label space for neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09260/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a fundamental task in natural language processing. It remains a research hotspot due to its wide applicability across domains. Although recent advances in deep learning have significantly improved NER performance, they rely heavily on large, high-quality annotated datasets. However, building these datasets is expensive and time-consuming, posing a major bottleneck for further research. Current dataset merging approaches mainly focus on strategies like manual label mapping or constructing label graphs, which lack interpretability and scalability. To address this, we propose an automatic label alignment method based on label similarity. The method combines empirical and semantic similarities, using a greedy pairwise merging strategy to unify label spaces across different datasets. Experiments are conducted in two stages: first, merging three existing NER datasets into a unified corpus with minimal impact on NER performance; second, integrating this corpus with a small-scale, self-built dataset in the financial domain. The results show that our method enables effective dataset merging and enhances NER performance in the low-resource financial domain. This study presents an efficient, interpretable, and scalable solution for integrating multi-source NER corpora.