Zero-shot Cross-lingual NER via Mitigating Language Difference: An Entity-aligned Translation Perspective

Abstract: Cross-lingual Named Entity Recognition (CL-NER) aims to transfer knowledge from high-resource languages to low-resource languages. However, existing zero-shot CL-NER (ZCL-NER) approaches primarily focus on Latin script language (LSL), where shared linguistic features facilitate effective knowledge transfer. In contrast, for non-Latin script language (NSL), such as Chinese and Japanese, performance often degrades due to deep structural differences. To address these challenges, we propose an entity-aligned translation (EAT) approach. Leveraging LLMs, EAT employs a dual-translation strategy to align entities between NSL and English. In addition, we fine-tune LLMs using multilingual Wikipedia data to enhance the entity alignment from source to target languages.