Onur Kuru


2016

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AI-KU at SemEval-2016 Task 11: Word Embeddings and Substring Features for Complex Word Identification
Onur Kuru
Proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2016)

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CharNER: Character-Level Named Entity Recognition
Onur Kuru | Ozan Arkan Can | Deniz Yuret
Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers

We describe and evaluate a character-level tagger for language-independent Named Entity Recognition (NER). Instead of words, a sentence is represented as a sequence of characters. The model consists of stacked bidirectional LSTMs which inputs characters and outputs tag probabilities for each character. These probabilities are then converted to consistent word level named entity tags using a Viterbi decoder. We are able to achieve close to state-of-the-art NER performance in seven languages with the same basic model using only labeled NER data and no hand-engineered features or other external resources like syntactic taggers or Gazetteers.