Adversarial Transfer Learning for Chinese Named Entity Recognition with Self-Attention Mechanism

Pengfei Cao, Yubo Chen, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao, Shengping Liu


Abstract
Named entity recognition (NER) is an important task in natural language processing area, which needs to determine entities boundaries and classify them into pre-defined categories. For Chinese NER task, there is only a very small amount of annotated data available. Chinese NER task and Chinese word segmentation (CWS) task have many similar word boundaries. There are also specificities in each task. However, existing methods for Chinese NER either do not exploit word boundary information from CWS or cannot filter the specific information of CWS. In this paper, we propose a novel adversarial transfer learning framework to make full use of task-shared boundaries information and prevent the task-specific features of CWS. Besides, since arbitrary character can provide important cues when predicting entity type, we exploit self-attention to explicitly capture long range dependencies between two tokens. Experimental results on two different widely used datasets show that our proposed model significantly and consistently outperforms other state-of-the-art methods.
Anthology ID:
D18-1017
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
October-November
Year:
2018
Address:
Brussels, Belgium
Editors:
Ellen Riloff, David Chiang, Julia Hockenmaier, Jun’ichi Tsujii
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
182–192
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D18-1017
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D18-1017
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Pengfei Cao, Yubo Chen, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao, and Shengping Liu. 2018. Adversarial Transfer Learning for Chinese Named Entity Recognition with Self-Attention Mechanism. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 182–192, Brussels, Belgium. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Adversarial Transfer Learning for Chinese Named Entity Recognition with Self-Attention Mechanism (Cao et al., EMNLP 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D18-1017.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/D18-1017.mp4
Code
 CPF-NLPR/AT4ChineseNER
Data
Weibo NER