FastNER: Speeding up Inferences for Named Entity Recognition Tasks

BERT and its variants are the most performing models for named entity recognition (NER), a fundamental information extraction task. We must apply inference speedup methods for BERT-based NER models to be deployed in the industrial setting. Early exiting allows the model to use only the shallow layers to process easy samples, thus reducing the average latency. In this work, we introduce FastNER, a novel framework for early exiting with a BERT biaffine NER model, which supports both flat NER tasks and nested NER tasks. First, we introduce a convolutional bypass module to provide suitable features for the current layer’s biaffine prediction head. This way, an intermediate layer can focus more on delivering high-quality semantic representations for the next layer. Second, we introduce a series of early exiting mechanisms for BERT biaffine model, which is the first in the literature. We conduct extensive experiments on 6 benchmark NER datasets, 3 of which are nested NER tasks. The experiments show that: (a) Our proposed convolutional bypass method can significantly improve the overall performances of the multi-exit BERT biaffine NER model. (b) our proposed early exiting mechanisms can effectively speed up the inference of BERT biaffine model. Comprehensive ablation studies are conducted and demonstrate the validity of our design for our FastNER framework.