In this paper we investigate the role of the dependency tree in a named entity recognizer upon using a set of GCN. We perform a comparison among different NER architectures and show that the grammar of a sentence positively influences the results. Experiments on the ontonotes dataset demonstrate consistent performance improvements, without requiring heavy feature engineering nor additional language-specific knowledge.
Named entity recognition (NER) is the task to identify text spans that mention named entities, and to classify them into predefined categories such as person, location, organization etc. NER serves as the basis for a variety of natural language applications such as question answering, text summarization, and machine translation. Although early NER systems are successful in producing decent recognition accuracy, they often require much human effort in carefully designing rules or features. In recent years, deep learning, empowered by continuous real-valued vector representations and semantic composition through nonlinear processing, has been employed in NER systems, yielding stat-of-the-art performance. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review on existing deep learning techniques for NER. We first introduce NER resources, including tagged NER corpora and off-the-shelf NER tools. Then, we systematically categorize existing works based on a taxonomy along three axes: distributed representations for input, context encoder, and tag decoder. Next, we survey the most representative methods for recent applied techniques of deep learning in new NER problem settings and applications. Finally, we present readers with the challenges faced by NER systems and outline future directions in this area.
Recently, neural methods have achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) results in Named Entity Recognition (NER) tasks for many languages without the need for manually crafted features. However, these models still require manually annotated training data, which is not available for many languages. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised cross-lingual NER model that can transfer NER knowledge from one language to another in a completely unsupervised way without relying on any bilingual dictionary or parallel data. Our model achieves this through word-level adversarial learning and augmented fine-tuning with parameter sharing and feature augmentation. Experiments on five different languages demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, outperforming existing models by a good margin and setting a new SOTA for each language pair.
Named entity recognition (NER) models are typically based on the architecture of Bi-directional LSTM (BiLSTM). The constraints of sequential nature and the modeling of single input prevent the full utilization of global information from larger scope, not only in the entire sentence, but also in the entire document (dataset). In this paper, we address these two deficiencies and propose a model augmented with hierarchical contextualized representation: sentence-level representation and document-level representation. In sentence-level, we take different contributions of words in a single sentence into consideration to enhance the sentence representation learned from an independent BiLSTM via label embedding attention mechanism. In document-level, the key-value memory network is adopted to record the document-aware information for each unique word which is sensitive to similarity of context information. Our two-level hierarchical contextualized representations are fused with each input token embedding and corresponding hidden state of BiLSTM, respectively. The experimental results on three benchmark NER datasets (CoNLL-2003 and Ontonotes 5.0 English datasets, CoNLL-2002 Spanish dataset) show that we establish new state-of-the-art results.
State-of-the-art named entity recognition (NER) systems have been improving continuously using neural architectures over the past several years. However, many tasks including NER require large sets of annotated data to achieve such performance. In particular, we focus on NER from clinical notes, which is one of the most fundamental and critical problems for medical text analysis. Our work centers on effectively adapting these neural architectures towards low-resource settings using parameter transfer methods. We complement a standard hierarchical NER model with a general transfer learning framework consisting of parameter sharing between the source and target tasks, and showcase scores significantly above the baseline architecture. These sharing schemes require an exponential search over tied parameter sets to generate an optimal configuration. To mitigate the problem of exhaustively searching for model optimization, we propose the Dynamic Transfer Networks (DTN), a gated architecture which learns the appropriate parameter sharing scheme between source and target datasets. DTN achieves the improvements of the optimized transfer learning framework with just a single training setting, effectively removing the need for exponential search.
Named entity recognition (NER) in Chinese is essential but difficult because of the lack of natural delimiters. Therefore, Chinese Word Segmentation (CWS) is usually considered as the first step for Chinese NER. However, models based on word-level embeddings and lexicon features often suffer from segmentation errors and out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words. In this paper, we investigate a Convolutional Attention Network called CAN for Chinese NER, which consists of a character-based convolutional neural network (CNN) with local-attention layer and a gated recurrent unit (GRU) with global self-attention layer to capture the information from adjacent characters and sentence contexts. Also, compared to other models, not depending on any external resources like lexicons and employing small size of char embeddings make our model more practical. Extensive experimental results show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods without word embedding and external lexicon resources on different domain datasets including Weibo, MSRA and Chinese Resume NER dataset.
Named entity recognition (NER) in Chinese is essential but difficult because of the lack of natural delimiters. Therefore, Chinese Word Segmentation (CWS) is usually considered as the first step for Chinese NER. However, models based on word-level embeddings and lexicon features often suffer from segmentation errors and out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words. In this paper, we investigate a Convolutional Attention Network called CAN for Chinese NER, which consists of a character-based convolutional neural network (CNN) with local-attention layer and a gated recurrent unit (GRU) with global self-attention layer to capture the information from adjacent characters and sentence contexts. Also, compared to other models, not depending on any external resources like lexicons and employing small size of char embeddings make our model more practical. Extensive experimental results show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods without word embedding and external lexicon resources on different domain datasets including Weibo, MSRA and Chinese Resume NER dataset.
Clinical Named Entity Recognition (CNER) aims to identify and classify clinical terms such as diseases, symptoms, treatments, exams, and body parts in electronic health records, which is a fundamental and crucial task for clinical and translational research. In recent years, deep neural networks have achieved significant success in named entity recognition and many other Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Most of these algorithms are trained end to end, and can automatically learn features from large scale labeled datasets. However, these data-driven methods typically lack the capability of processing rare or unseen entities. Previous statistical methods and feature engineering practice have demonstrated that human knowledge can provide valuable information for handling rare and unseen cases. In this paper, we address the problem by incorporating dictionaries into deep neural networks for the Chinese CNER task. Two different architectures that extend the Bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory (Bi-LSTM) neural network and five different feature representation schemes are proposed to handle the task. Computational results on the CCKS-2017 Task 2 benchmark dataset show that the proposed method achieves the highly competitive performance compared with the state-of-the-art deep learning methods.
Motivation: Biomedical named entity recognition (BioNER) is the most fundamental task in biomedical text mining. State-of-the-art BioNER systems often require handcrafted features specifically designed for each type of biomedical entities. This feature generation process requires intensive labors from biomedical and linguistic experts, and makes it difficult to adapt these systems to new biomedical entity types. Although recent studies explored using neural network models for BioNER to free experts from manual feature generation, these models still require substantial human efforts to annotate massive training data. Results: We propose a multi-task learning framework for BioNER that is based on neural network models to save human efforts. We build a global model by collectively training multiple models that share parameters, each model capturing the characteristics of a different biomedical entity type. In experiments on five BioNER benchmark datasets covering four major biomedical entity types, our model outperforms state-of-the-art systems and other neural network models by a large margin, even when only limited training data are available. Further analysis shows that the large performance gains come from sharing character- and word-level information between different biomedical entities. The approach creates new opportunities for text-mining approaches to help biomedical scientists better exploit knowledge in biomedical literature.
When extracting information from handwritten documents, text transcription and named entity recognition are usually faced as separate subsequent tasks. This has the disadvantage that errors in the first module affect heavily the performance of the second module. In this work we propose to do both tasks jointly, using a single neural network with a common architecture used for plain text recognition. Experimentally, the work has been tested on a collection of historical marriage records. Results of experiments are presented to show the effect on the performance for different configurations: different ways of encoding the information, doing or not transfer learning and processing at text line or multi-line region level. The results are comparable to state of the art reported in the ICDAR 2017 Information Extraction competition, even though the proposed technique does not use any dictionaries, language modeling or post processing.
Deep learning has yielded state-of-the-art performance on many natural language processing tasks including named entity recognition (NER). However, this typically requires large amounts of labeled data. In this work, we demonstrate that the amount of labeled training data can be drastically reduced when deep learning is combined with active learning. While active learning is sample-efficient, it can be computationally expensive since it requires iterative retraining. To speed this up, we introduce a lightweight architecture for NER, viz., the CNN-CNN-LSTM model consisting of convolutional character and word encoders and a long short term memory (LSTM) tag decoder. The model achieves nearly state-of-the-art performance on standard datasets for the task while being computationally much more efficient than best performing models. We carry out incremental active learning, during the training process, and are able to nearly match state-of-the-art performance with just 25\% of the original training data.