This shared task focuses on identifying unusual, previously-unseen entities in the context of emerging discussions. Named entities form the basis of many modern approaches to other tasks (like event clustering and summarization), but recall on them is a real problem in noisy text - even among annotators. This drop tends to be due to novel entities and surface forms. Take for example the tweet “so.. kktny in 30 mins?!” – even human experts find the entity ‘kktny’ hard to detect and resolve. The goal of this task is to provide a definition of emerging and of rare entities, and based on that, also datasets for detecting these entities. The task as described in this paper evaluated the ability of participating entries to detect and classify novel and emerging named entities in noisy text.

We address the problem of acquiring the ontological categories of unknown terms through implicit confirmation in dialogues. We develop an approach that makes implicit confirmation requests with an unknown term’s predicted category. Our approach does not degrade user experience with repetitive explicit confirmations, but the system has difficulty determining if information in the confirmation request can be correctly acquired. To overcome this challenge, we propose a method for determining whether or not the predicted category is correct, which is included in an implicit confirmation request. Our method exploits multiple user responses to implicit confirmation requests containing the same ontological category. Experimental results revealed that the proposed method exhibited a higher precision rate for determining the correctly predicted categories than when only single user responses were considered.

Named entity recognition is a challenging task that has traditionally required large amounts of knowledge in the form of feature engineering and lexicons to achieve high performance. In this paper, we present a novel neural network architecture that automatically detects word- and character-level features using a hybrid bidirectional LSTM and CNN architecture, eliminating the need for most feature engineering. We also propose a novel method of encoding partial lexicon matches in neural networks and compare it to existing approaches. Extensive evaluation shows that, given only tokenized text and publicly available word embeddings, our system is competitive on the CoNLL-2003 dataset and surpasses the previously reported state of the art performance on the OntoNotes 5.0 dataset by 2.13 F1 points. By using two lexicons constructed from publicly-available sources, we establish new state of the art performance with an F1 score of 91.62 on CoNLL-2003 and 86.28 on OntoNotes, surpassing systems that employ heavy feature engineering, proprietary lexicons, and rich entity linking information.

In this paper, we describe the DeepNNNER entry to The 2nd Workshop on Noisy User-generated Text (WNUT) Shared Task #2: Named Entity Recognition in Twitter. Our shared task submission adopts the bidirectional LSTM-CNN model of Chiu and Nichols (2016), as it has been shown to perform well on both newswire and Web texts. It uses word embeddings trained on large-scale Web text collections together with text normalization to cope with the diversity in Web texts, and lexicons for target named entity classes constructed from publicly-available sources. Extended evaluation comparing the effectiveness of various word embeddings, text normalization, and lexicon settings shows that our system achieves a maximum F1-score of 47.24, performance surpassing that of the shared task’s second-ranked system.

Large amounts of training data are essential for training statistical machine translations systems. In this paper we show how training data can be expanded by paraphrasing one side. The new data is made by parsing then generating using a precise HPSG based grammar, which gives sentences with the same meaning, but minor variations in lexical choice and word order. In experiments with Japanese and English, we showed consistent gains on the Tanaka Corpus with less consistent improvement on the IWSLT 2005 evaluation data.

We propose a method to alleviate the problem of referential granularity for Japanese zero pronoun resolution. We use dictionary definition sentences to extract ‘representative’ arguments of predicative definition words; e.g. ‘arrest’ is likely to take police as the subject and criminal as its object. These representative arguments are far more informative than ‘person’ that is provided by other valency dictionaries. They are auto-extracted using both Shallow parsing and Deep parsing for greater quality and quantity. Initial results are highly promising, obtaining more specific information about selectional preferences. An architecture of zero pronoun resolution using these representative arguments is described.