Simplify the Usage of Lexicon in Chinese NER

Ruotian Ma, Minlong Peng, Qi Zhang, Zhongyu Wei, Xuanjing Huang


Abstract
Recently, many works have tried to augment the performance of Chinese named entity recognition (NER) using word lexicons. As a representative, Lattice-LSTM has achieved new benchmark results on several public Chinese NER datasets. However, Lattice-LSTM has a complex model architecture. This limits its application in many industrial areas where real-time NER responses are needed. In this work, we propose a simple but effective method for incorporating the word lexicon into the character representations. This method avoids designing a complicated sequence modeling architecture, and for any neural NER model, it requires only subtle adjustment of the character representation layer to introduce the lexicon information. Experimental studies on four benchmark Chinese NER datasets show that our method achieves an inference speed up to 6.15 times faster than those of state-of-the-art methods, along with a better performance. The experimental results also show that the proposed method can be easily incorporated with pre-trained models like BERT.
Anthology ID:
2020.acl-main.528
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:
5951–5960
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.528
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.528
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ruotian Ma, Minlong Peng, Qi Zhang, Zhongyu Wei, and Xuanjing Huang. 2020. Simplify the Usage of Lexicon in Chinese NER. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 5951–5960, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Simplify the Usage of Lexicon in Chinese NER (Ma et al., ACL 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.528.pdf
Video:
 http://slideslive.com/38928863
Code
 v-mipeng/LexiconAugmentedNER +  additional community code
Data
MSRA CN NEROntoNotes 4.0Resume NERWeibo NER