Low-Resource Name Tagging Learned with Weakly Labeled Data

Yixin Cao, Zikun Hu, Tat-seng Chua, Zhiyuan Liu, Heng Ji


Abstract
Name tagging in low-resource languages or domains suffers from inadequate training data. Existing work heavily relies on additional information, while leaving those noisy annotations unexplored that extensively exist on the web. In this paper, we propose a novel neural model for name tagging solely based on weakly labeled (WL) data, so that it can be applied in any low-resource settings. To take the best advantage of all WL sentences, we split them into high-quality and noisy portions for two modules, respectively: (1) a classification module focusing on the large portion of noisy data can efficiently and robustly pretrain the tag classifier by capturing textual context semantics; and (2) a costly sequence labeling module focusing on high-quality data utilizes Partial-CRFs with non-entity sampling to achieve global optimum. Two modules are combined via shared parameters. Extensive experiments involving five low-resource languages and fine-grained food domain demonstrate our superior performance (6% and 7.8% F1 gains on average) as well as efficiency.
Anthology ID:
D19-1025
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Jing Jiang, Vincent Ng, Xiaojun Wan
Venues:
EMNLP | IJCNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
261–270
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1025
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1025
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yixin Cao, Zikun Hu, Tat-seng Chua, Zhiyuan Liu, and Heng Ji. 2019. Low-Resource Name Tagging Learned with Weakly Labeled Data. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pages 261–270, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Low-Resource Name Tagging Learned with Weakly Labeled Data (Cao et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1025.pdf
Code
 zig-kwin-hu/Low-Resource-Name-Tagging