Named Entity Recognition with Context-Aware Dictionary Knowledge

Chuhan Wu, Fangzhao Wu, Tao Qi, Yongfeng Huang


Abstract
Named entity recognition (NER) is an important task in the natural language processing field. Existing NER methods heavily rely on labeled data for model training, and their performance on rare entities is usually unsatisfactory. Entity dictionaries can cover many entities including both popular ones and rare ones, and are useful for NER. However, many entity names are context-dependent and it is not optimal to directly apply dictionaries without considering the context. In this paper, we propose a neural NER approach which can exploit dictionary knowledge with contextual information. We propose to learn context-aware dictionary knowledge by modeling the interactions between the entities in dictionaries and their contexts via context-dictionary attention. In addition, we propose an auxiliary term classification task to predict the types of the matched entity names, and jointly train it with the NER model to fuse both contexts and dictionary knowledge into NER. Extensive experiments on the CoNLL-2003 benchmark dataset validate the effectiveness of our approach in exploiting entity dictionaries to improve the performance of various NER models.
Anthology ID:
2020.ccl-1.85
Volume:
Proceedings of the 19th Chinese National Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
October
Year:
2020
Address:
Haikou, China
Editors:
Maosong Sun (孙茂松), Sujian Li (李素建), Yue Zhang (张岳), Yang Liu (刘洋)
Venue:
CCL
SIG:
Publisher:
Chinese Information Processing Society of China
Note:
Pages:
915–926
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.ccl-1.85
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Chuhan Wu, Fangzhao Wu, Tao Qi, and Yongfeng Huang. 2020. Named Entity Recognition with Context-Aware Dictionary Knowledge. In Proceedings of the 19th Chinese National Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 915–926, Haikou, China. Chinese Information Processing Society of China.
Cite (Informal):
Named Entity Recognition with Context-Aware Dictionary Knowledge (Wu et al., CCL 2020)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.ccl-1.85.pdf