A Reasoning Paradigm for Named Entity Recognition

Generative LLMs typically improve Named Entity Recognition (NER) performance through instruction tuning. They excel at generating entities by semantic pattern matching but lack an explicit, verifiable reasoning mechanism. This ``cognitive shortcutting'' leads to suboptimal performance and brittle generalization, especially in zero-shot and low-resource scenarios where reasoning from limited contextual cues is crucial. To address this problem, a reasoning framework is proposed for NER, which shifts the extraction paradigm from implicit pattern matching to explicit reasoning. This framework consists of three stages: Chain-of Thought (CoT) generation, CoT tuning, and reasoning enhancement. First, a dataset annotated with NER-oriented CoTs is generated, which contain task-relevant reasoning chains. Then, they are used to tune the NER model to generate coherent rationales before deriving the final answer. Finally, a reasoning enhancement stage is implemented to optimize the reasoning process using a comprehensive reward signal. This stage ensures explicit and verifiable extractions. Experiments show that ReasoningNER demonstrates impressive cognitive ability in the NER task, achieving competitive performance. In zero-shot settings, it achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance, outperforming GPT-4 by $12.3$ percentage points on the F1 score. Analytical results also demonstrate its great potential to advance research in reasoning-oriented information extraction.