{"ID":2879616,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.16833","arxiv_id":"2508.16833","title":"ReProCon: Scalable and Resource-Efficient Few-Shot Biomedical Named Entity Recognition","abstract":"Named Entity Recognition (NER) in biomedical domains faces challenges due to data scarcity and imbalanced label distributions, especially with fine-grained entity types. We propose ReProCon, a novel few-shot NER framework that combines multi-prototype modeling, cosine-contrastive learning, and Reptile meta-learning to tackle these issues. By representing each category with multiple prototypes, ReProCon captures semantic variability, such as synonyms and contextual differences, while a cosine-contrastive objective ensures strong interclass separation. Reptile meta-updates enable quick adaptation with little data. Using a lightweight fastText + BiLSTM encoder with much lower memory usage, ReProCon achieves a macro-$F_1$ score close to BERT-based baselines (around 99 percent of BERT performance). The model remains stable with a label budget of 30 percent and only drops 7.8 percent in $F_1$ when expanding from 19 to 50 categories, outperforming baselines such as SpanProto and CONTaiNER, which see 10 to 32 percent degradation in Few-NERD. Ablation studies highlight the importance of multi-prototype modeling and contrastive learning in managing class imbalance. Despite difficulties with label ambiguity, ReProCon demonstrates state-of-the-art performance in resource-limited settings, making it suitable for biomedical applications.","short_abstract":"Named Entity Recognition (NER) in biomedical domains faces challenges due to data scarcity and imbalanced label distributions, especially with fine-grained entity types. We propose ReProCon, a novel few-shot NER framework that combines multi-prototype modeling, cosine-contrastive learning, and Reptile meta-learning to...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.16833","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.16833v1","authors":"[\"Jeongkyun Yoo\",\"Nela Riddle\",\"Andrew Hoblitzell\"]","published":"2025-08-22T23:15:20Z","proceeding":"cs.CL","tasks":"[\"cs.CL\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}