DiZiNER: Disagreement-guided Instruction Refinement via Pilot Annotation Simulation for Zero-shot Named Entity Recognition

Large language models (LLMs) have advanced information extraction (IE) by enabling zero-shot and few-shot named entity recognition (NER), yet their generative outputs still show persistent and systematic errors. Despite progress through instruction fine-tuning, zero-shot NER still lags far behind supervised systems. These recurring errors mirror inconsistencies observed in early-stage human annotation processes that resolve disagreements through pilot annotation. Motivated by this analogy, we introduce DiZiNER (Disagreement-guided Instruction Refinement via Pilot Annotation Simulation for Zero-shot Named Entity Recognition), a framework that simulates the pilot annotation process, employing LLMs to act as both annotators and supervisors. Multiple heterogeneous LLMs annotate shared texts, and a supervisor model analyzes inter-model disagreements to refine task instructions. Across 18 benchmarks, DiZiNER achieves zero-shot SOTA results on 14 datasets, improving prior bests by +8.0 F1 and reducing the zero-shot to supervised gap by over +11 points. It also consistently outperforms its supervisor, GPT-5 mini, indicating that improvements stem from disagreement-guided instruction refinement rather than model capacity. Pairwise agreement between models shows a strong correlation with NER performance, further supporting this finding.