Papers

This research presents a comprehensive diagnostic study of confidence-gated iterative induction for zero-shot Named Entity Recognition (NER) in crisis scenarios. While existing approaches struggle to adapt to novel disaster lexicons without manually curated resources, we investigate whether iterative knowledge distillation can overcome these limitations. Our framework leverages a pretrained language model to extract high-recall entity candidates, then iteratively distills domain knowledge through a self-correcting loop that uses high-confidence seeds to induce micro-gazetteers and syntactic rules. Comprehensive evaluations on synthetic crisis data reveal that the framework maintains a constant zero-shot F1-score of approximately 0.295 across all experimental configurations, demonstrating that the iterative mechanism provides no measurable improvement over baseline approaches. This negative result offers valuable diagnostic insights into the fundamental challenges of adaptive NER in dynamic crisis domains, including confidence threshold calibration difficulties, clustering algorithm limitations, and error propagation risks. The findings provide a cautionary tale for researchers working on adaptive NER systems and establish a foundation for future research on more robust zero-shot approaches in crisis scenarios.