On-Device Named-Entity Recognition: A Deployability Study of Accuracy, Cost, Reliability, and Confidence

Named-entity recognition (NER) is increasingly wanted on-device (no API, low latency, data kept local). The practitioner's question is not the leaderboard but which model is deployable, how to evaluate it without human annotation, and whether its confidence can be trusted. We answer these jointly. We place nine systems across three paradigms and 13 M to 8 B parameters: a classical tagger (spaCy), bidirectional-encoder specialists (GLiNER, 166 to 460 M), and generative LLMs run locally (Qwen3-0.6B/1.7B/4B-Instruct, DeepSeek-R1-1.5B/8B), on three datasets of differing character, and report accuracy plus two axes the literature omits: latency and output validity. Because our corpus (RSS-News) had no gold, we built silver gold from a cross-family LLM judge panel, then measured its fidelity against benchmark gold and a full human re-validation of the corpus (strict F1 0.95, an upper bound since the human gold was silver-seeded); gold provenance flips the paradigm ranking, moving from LLM-authored silver to human gold raises every encoder and lowers every generative model. On accuracy alone a 4 B instruct LLM is competitive (it leads on clean newswire), so the encoder's case is deployability: it matches or slightly trails at one-ninth to one-twenty-fourth the size, at millisecond-to-second latency, with zero malformed output, while the smallest generative models emit up to 27% invalid output on long inputs, a failure fixed by scale, not output budget. We then characterize GLiNER's per-span confidence: it ranks correctness well (AUROC 0.76 to 0.86) but is overconfident (ECE 0.24 to 0.47, halved by temperature scaling); thresholding gives a small honest out-of-sample F1 gain; an all-local small-to-large cascade gives a modest, corpus-dependent gain over cost-matched random routing; and confidence tracks correctness but not novelty. Every number recomputes offline from per-span records.