Multi-Domain Named Entity Recognition with Genre-Aware and Agnostic Inference

Jing Wang, Mayank Kulkarni, Daniel Preotiuc-Pietro


Abstract
Named entity recognition is a key component of many text processing pipelines and it is thus essential for this component to be robust to different types of input. However, domain transfer of NER models with data from multiple genres has not been widely studied. To this end, we conduct NER experiments in three predictive setups on data from: a) multiple domains; b) multiple domains where the genre label is unknown at inference time; c) domains not encountered in training. We introduce a new architecture tailored to this task by using shared and private domain parameters and multi-task learning. This consistently outperforms all other baseline and competitive methods on all three experimental setups, with differences ranging between +1.95 to +3.11 average F1 across multiple genres when compared to standard approaches. These results illustrate the challenges that need to be taken into account when building real-world NLP applications that are robust to various types of text and the methods that can help, at least partially, alleviate these issues.
Anthology ID:
2020.acl-main.750
Volume:
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Dan Jurafsky, Joyce Chai, Natalie Schluter, Joel Tetreault
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
8476–8488
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.750
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.750
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jing Wang, Mayank Kulkarni, and Daniel Preotiuc-Pietro. 2020. Multi-Domain Named Entity Recognition with Genre-Aware and Agnostic Inference. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 8476–8488, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Multi-Domain Named Entity Recognition with Genre-Aware and Agnostic Inference (Wang et al., ACL 2020)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-2/2020.acl-main.750.pdf
Video:
 http://slideslive.com/38929187