In plain words: A tool that scans every possible stretch of words to spot and label entity mentions, catching entities that overlap or nest within each other. It beat the best systems on nested and non-overlapping entity tasks by up to 4.4 points on the standard accuracy score.
Abstract
This paper presents a novel framework, MGNER, for Multi-Grained Named Entity Recognition where multiple entities or entity mentions in a sentence could be non-overlapping or totally nested. Different from traditional approaches regarding NER as a sequential labeling task and annotate entities consecutively, MGNER detects and recognizes entities on multiple granularities: it is able to recognize named entities without explicitly assuming non-overlapping or totally nested structures. MGNER consists of a Detector that examines all possible word segments and a Classifier that categorizes entities. In addition, contextual information and a self-attention mechanism are utilized throughout the framework to improve the NER performance. Experimental results show that MGNER outperforms current state-of-the-art baselines up to 4.4% in terms of the F1 score among nested/non-overlapping NER tasks.
Congying Xia, Chenwei Zhang, Tao Yang, Yaliang Li, Nan Du, Xian Wu, Wei Fan, Fenglong Ma, Philip Yu
arXiv:1906.08449 · cs.CL · submitted Jun 20, 2019
abstract · pdf · html · In ACL 2019 as a long paper