2024 (EMNLP)

Embedded Named Entity Recognition using Probing Classifiers

Nicholas Popovič, Michael Färber

TLDR: A light-weight method for extracting named entities from generated text during streaming text generation with language models.


Abstract

Streaming text generation, has become a common way of increasing the responsiveness of language model powered applications such as chat assistants. At the same time, extracting semantic information from generated text is a useful tool for applications such as automated fact checking or retrieval augmented generation. Currently, this requires either separate models during inference, which increases computational cost, or destructive fine-tuning of the language model. Instead, we propose an approach called EMBER which enables streaming named entity recognition in decoder-only language models without fine-tuning them and while incurring minimal additional computational cost at inference time. Specifically, our experiments show that EMBER maintains high token generation rates, with only a negligible decrease in speed of around 1% compared to a 43.64% slowdown measured for a baseline. We make our code and data available online, including a toolkit for training, testing, and deploying efficient token classification models optimized for streaming text generation.

Demo

Interactive demo of EMBER applied in a chatbot setting. The demo is running the model meta-llama/Llama-3.2-1B.