# Decoding Text Spans for Efficient and Accurate Named-Entity Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.20447 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.20447/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 21 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [MiniLM: Deep Self-Attention Distillation for Task-Agnostic Compression of Pre-Trained Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10957/) (2020)
- [Entity, Relation, and Event Extraction with Contextualized Span Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03546/) (2019)
- [GPT-NER: Named Entity Recognition via Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10428/) (2023)
- [CrossNER: Evaluating Cross-Domain Named Entity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.04373/) (2020)
- [GLiNER: Generalist Model for Named Entity Recognition using Bidirectional Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08526/) (2023)
- [Automated Concatenation of Embeddings for Structured Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05006/) (2020)
- [CrossWeigh: Training Named Entity Tagger from Imperfect Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01441/) (2019)
- [NuNER: Entity Recognition Encoder Pre-training via LLM-Annotated Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15343/) (2024)
- [Split-NER: Named Entity Recognition via Two Question-Answering-based Classifications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.19942/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a key component in industrial information extraction pipelines, where systems must satisfy strict latency and throughput constraints in addition to strong accuracy. State-of-the-art NER accuracy is often achieved by span-based frameworks, which construct span representations from token encodings and classify candidate spans. However, many span-based methods enumerate large numbers of candidates and process each candidate with marker-augmented inputs, substantially increasing inference cost and limiting scalability in large-scale deployments. In this work, we propose SpanDec, an efficient span-based NER framework that targets this bottleneck. Our main insight is that span representation interactions can be computed effectively at the final transformer stage, avoiding redundant computation in earlier layers via a lightweight decoder dedicated to span representations. We further introduce a span filtering mechanism during enumeration to prune unlikely candidates before expensive processing. Across multiple benchmarks, SpanDec matches competitive span-based baselines while improving throughput and reducing computational cost, yielding a better accuracy-efficiency trade-off suitable for high-volume serving and on-device applications.