Neural Architectures for Nested NER through Linearization

Jana Straková, Milan Straka, Jan Hajic


Abstract
We propose two neural network architectures for nested named entity recognition (NER), a setting in which named entities may overlap and also be labeled with more than one label. We encode the nested labels using a linearized scheme. In our first proposed approach, the nested labels are modeled as multilabels corresponding to the Cartesian product of the nested labels in a standard LSTM-CRF architecture. In the second one, the nested NER is viewed as a sequence-to-sequence problem, in which the input sequence consists of the tokens and output sequence of the labels, using hard attention on the word whose label is being predicted. The proposed methods outperform the nested NER state of the art on four corpora: ACE-2004, ACE-2005, GENIA and Czech CNEC. We also enrich our architectures with the recently published contextual embeddings: ELMo, BERT and Flair, reaching further improvements for the four nested entity corpora. In addition, we report flat NER state-of-the-art results for CoNLL-2002 Dutch and Spanish and for CoNLL-2003 English.
Anthology ID:
P19-1527
Volume:
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2019
Address:
Florence, Italy
Editors:
Anna Korhonen, David Traum, Lluís Màrquez
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5326–5331
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1527
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P19-1527
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jana Straková, Milan Straka, and Jan Hajic. 2019. Neural Architectures for Nested NER through Linearization. In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 5326–5331, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Neural Architectures for Nested NER through Linearization (Straková et al., ACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-3/P19-1527.pdf
Data
ACE 2004ACE 2005CoNLLCoNLL 2002CoNLL 2003GENIA