English

The Million-Label NER: Breaking Scale Barriers with GLiNER bi-encoder

Computation and Language 2026-02-24 v1 Machine Learning

Abstract

This paper introduces GLiNER-bi-Encoder, a novel architecture for Named Entity Recognition (NER) that harmonizes zero-shot flexibility with industrial-scale efficiency. While the original GLiNER framework offers strong generalization, its joint-encoding approach suffers from quadratic complexity as the number of entity labels increases. Our proposed bi-encoder design decouples the process into a dedicated label encoder and a context encoder, effectively removing the context-window bottleneck. This architecture enables the simultaneous recognition of thousands, and potentially millions, of entity types with minimal overhead. Experimental results demonstrate state-of-the-art zero-shot performance, achieving 61.5 percent Micro-F1 on the CrossNER benchmark. Crucially, by leveraging pre-computed label embeddings, GLiNER-bi-Encoder achieves up to a 130 times throughput improvement at 1024 labels compared to its uni-encoder predecessors. Furthermore, we introduce GLiNKER, a modular framework that leverages this architecture for high-performance entity linking across massive knowledge bases such as Wikidata.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.18487,
  title  = {The Million-Label NER: Breaking Scale Barriers with GLiNER bi-encoder},
  author = {Ihor Stepanov and Mykhailo Shtopko and Dmytro Vodianytskyi and Oleksandr Lukashov},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.18487},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

13 pages, 1 figure, 4 tables

R2 v1 2026-07-01T10:45:06.503Z