Generation-Based Few-Shot BioNER via Local Knowledge Index and Dual Prompts

Few-shot Biomedical Named Entity Recognition (BioNER) presents significant challenges due to limited training data and the presence of nested and discontinuous entities. To tackle these issues, a novel approach GKP-BioNER, Generation-based Few-Shot BioNER via Local Knowledge Index and Dual Prompts, is proposed. It redefines BioNER as a generation task by integrating hard and soft prompts. Specifically, GKP-BioNER constructs a localized knowledge index using a Wikipedia dump, facilitating the retrieval of semantically relevant texts to the original sentence. These texts are then reordered to prioritize the most semantically relevant content to the input data, serving as hard prompts. This helps the model to address challenges demanding domain-specific insights. Simultaneously, GKP-BioNER preserves the integrity of the pre-trained models while introducing learnable parameters as soft prompts to guide the self-attention layer, allowing the model to adapt to the context. Moreover, a soft prompt mechanism is designed to support knowledge transfer across domains. Extensive experiments on five datasets demonstrate that GKP-BioNER significantly outperforms eight state-of-the-art methods. It shows robust performance in low-resource and complex scenarios across various domains, highlighting its strength in knowledge transfer and broad applicability.