Contrastive Learning with Gaussian Embeddings and Self-Attention for Few-Shot Named Entity Recognition

Named entity recognition (NER) in few-shot scenarios plays a critical role in entity annotation for low-resource domains. However, existing methods are often limited to learning semantic features and intermediate representations specific to the source domain, which restricts their generalization capability when applied to unseen target domains and leads to prominent performance degradation. To address this issue, we propose a novel few-shot NER model based on contrastive learning. Specifically, the model enhances token representations through Gaussian distribution embedding and a self-attention mechanism, while adaptively optimizing the weighting parameters of the contrastive loss to achieve performance improvement. This design effectively mitigates overfitting and enhances the model’s generalization ability. Experiments on multiple datasets (including CoNLL2003, GUM, and Few-NERD) demonstrate that our approach achieves performance gains of 2.05% to 15.89% compared to state-of-the-art methods. These results confirm the effectiveness of our model in few-shot NER tasks and suggest its potential for broader application in low-resource information extraction scenarios.