A Local Detection Approach for Named Entity Recognition and Mention Detection

Mingbin Xu, Hui Jiang, Sedtawut Watcharawittayakul


Abstract
In this paper, we study a novel approach for named entity recognition (NER) and mention detection (MD) in natural language processing. Instead of treating NER as a sequence labeling problem, we propose a new local detection approach, which relies on the recent fixed-size ordinally forgetting encoding (FOFE) method to fully encode each sentence fragment and its left/right contexts into a fixed-size representation. Subsequently, a simple feedforward neural network (FFNN) is learned to either reject or predict entity label for each individual text fragment. The proposed method has been evaluated in several popular NER and MD tasks, including CoNLL 2003 NER task and TAC-KBP2015 and TAC-KBP2016 Tri-lingual Entity Discovery and Linking (EDL) tasks. Our method has yielded pretty strong performance in all of these examined tasks. This local detection approach has shown many advantages over the traditional sequence labeling methods.
Anthology ID:
P17-1114
Volume:
Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2017
Address:
Vancouver, Canada
Editors:
Regina Barzilay, Min-Yen Kan
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1237–1247
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P17-1114
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P17-1114
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mingbin Xu, Hui Jiang, and Sedtawut Watcharawittayakul. 2017. A Local Detection Approach for Named Entity Recognition and Mention Detection. In Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 1237–1247, Vancouver, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Local Detection Approach for Named Entity Recognition and Mention Detection (Xu et al., ACL 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/P17-1114.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/P17-1114.mp4