NER Retriever: Zero-Shot Named Entity Retrieval with Type-Aware
  Embeddings
Authors: name: Or Shachar; name: Uri Katz; name: Yoav Goldberg; name: Oren Glickman
Published: 2025-09-04 08:42:23

Abstract: We present NER Retriever, a zero-shot retrieval framework for ad-hoc Named
Entity Retrieval, a variant of Named Entity Recognition (NER), where the types
of interest are not provided in advance, and a user-defined type description is
used to retrieve documents mentioning entities of that type. Instead of relying
on fixed schemas or fine-tuned models, our method builds on internal
representations of large language models (LLMs) to embed both entity mentions
and user-provided open-ended type descriptions into a shared semantic space. We
show that internal representations, specifically the value vectors from
mid-layer transformer blocks, encode fine-grained type information more
effectively than commonly used top-layer embeddings. To refine these
representations, we train a lightweight contrastive projection network that
aligns type-compatible entities while separating unrelated types. The resulting
entity embeddings are compact, type-aware, and well-suited for nearest-neighbor
search. Evaluated on three benchmarks, NER Retriever significantly outperforms
both lexical and dense sentence-level retrieval baselines. Our findings provide
empirical support for representation selection within LLMs and demonstrate a
practical solution for scalable, schema-free entity retrieval. The NER
Retriever Codebase is publicly available at
https://github.com/ShacharOr100/ner_retriever