CNN-Based Chinese NER with Lexicon Rethinking

CNN-Based Chinese NER with Lexicon Rethinking

Tao Gui, Ruotian Ma, Qi Zhang, Lujun Zhao, Yu-Gang Jiang, Xuanjing Huang

Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 4982-4988. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2019/692

Character-level Chinese named entity recognition (NER) that applies long short-term memory (LSTM) to incorporate lexicons has achieved great success. However, this method fails to fully exploit GPU parallelism and candidate lexicons can conflict. In this work, we propose a faster alternative to Chinese NER: a convolutional neural network (CNN)-based method that incorporates lexicons using a rethinking mechanism. The proposed method can model all the characters and potential words that match the sentence in parallel. In addition, the rethinking mechanism can address the word conflict by feeding back the high-level features to refine the networks. Experimental results on four datasets show that the proposed method can achieve better performance than both word-level and character-level baseline methods. In addition, the proposed method performs up to 3.21 times faster than state-of-the-art methods, while realizing better performance.
Keywords:
Natural Language Processing: Named Entities
Natural Language Processing: Tagging, chunking, and parsing
Natural Language Processing: Phonology, Morphology, and word segmentation