Enhancing NER Performance in Low-Resource Pakistani Languages using Cross-Lingual Data Augmentation

Abstract: Named Entity Recognition (NER), a fundamental task in NLP, has shown significant advancements for high-resource languages. However, due to a lack of annotated datasets and limited representation in Pre-trained LLMs (PLMs), it remains understudied and challenging for low-resource languages. To address these challenges, we propose a data augmentation technique that generates culturally plausible sentences and experiments on four low-resource Pakistani languages; Urdu, Shahmukhi, Sindhi, and Pashto. By fine-tuning multilingual masked LLMs, our approach demonstrates significant improvements in NER performance for Shahmukhi and Pashto. We further explore the capability of generative LLMs for NER and data augmentation using few-shot learning.