Shiyuan Xiao


2019

pdf bib
Similarity Based Auxiliary Classifier for Named Entity Recognition
Shiyuan Xiao | Yuanxin Ouyang | Wenge Rong | Jianxin Yang | Zhang Xiong
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

The segmentation problem is one of the fundamental challenges associated with name entity recognition (NER) tasks that aim to reduce the boundary error when detecting a sequence of entity words. A considerable number of advanced approaches have been proposed and most of them exhibit performance deterioration when entities become longer. Inspired by previous work in which a multi-task strategy is used to solve segmentation problems, we design a similarity based auxiliary classifier (SAC), which can distinguish entity words from non-entity words. Unlike conventional classifiers, SAC uses vectors to indicate tags. Therefore, SAC can calculate the similarities between words and tags, and then compute a weighted sum of the tag vectors, which can be considered a useful feature for NER tasks. Empirical results are used to verify the rationality of the SAC structure and demonstrate the SAC model’s potential in performance improvement against our baseline approaches.