Recurrent Neural Network models are the state-of-the-art for Named Entity Recognition (NER). We present two innovations to improve the performance of these models. The first innovation is the introduction of residual connections between the Stacked Recurrent Neural Network model to address the degradation problem of deep neural networks. The second innovation is a bias decoding mechanism that allows the trained system to adapt to non-differentiable and externally computed objectives, such as the entity-based F-measure. Our work improves the state-of-the-art results for both Spanish and English languages on the standard train/development/test split of the CoNLL 2003 Shared Task NER dataset.

The task of identifying the language in which a given document (ranging from a sentence to thousands of pages) is written has been relatively well studied over several decades. Automated approachesto written language identification are used widely throughout research and industrial contexts, over both oral and written source materials. Despite this widespread acceptance, a review of previous research in written language identification reveals a number of questions which remain openand ripe for further investigation.