Leveraging Multi-Token Entities in Document-Level Named Entity Recognition

Authors

  • Anwen Hu Renmin University of China
  • Zhicheng Dou Renmin University of China
  • Jian-Yun Nie Université de Montréal
  • Ji-Rong Wen Renmin University of China

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v34i05.6304

Abstract

Most state-of-the-art named entity recognition systems are designed to process each sentence within a document independently. These systems are easy to confuse entity types when the context information in a sentence is not sufficient enough. To utilize the context information within the whole document, most document-level work let neural networks on their own to learn the relation across sentences, which is not intuitive enough for us humans. In this paper, we divide entities to multi-token entities that contain multiple tokens and single-token entities that are composed of a single token. We propose that the context information of multi-token entities should be more reliable in document-level NER for news articles. We design a fusion attention mechanism which not only learns the semantic relevance between occurrences of the same token, but also focuses more on occurrences belonging to multi-tokens entities. To identify multi-token entities, we design an auxiliary task namely ‘Multi-token Entity Classification’ and perform this task simultaneously with document-level NER. This auxiliary task is simplified from NER and doesn't require extra annotation. Experimental results on the CoNLL-2003 dataset and OntoNotesnbm dataset show that our model outperforms state-of-the-art sentence-level and document-level NER methods.

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Published

2020-04-03

How to Cite

Hu, A., Dou, Z., Nie, J.-Y., & Wen, J.-R. (2020). Leveraging Multi-Token Entities in Document-Level Named Entity Recognition. Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 34(05), 7961-7968. https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v34i05.6304

Issue

Section

AAAI Technical Track: Natural Language Processing