Connecting Distant Entities with Induction through Conditional Random Fields for Named Entity Recognition: Precursor-Induced CRF

Abstract

This paper presents a method of designing specific high-order dependency factor on the linear chain conditional random fields (CRFs) for named entity recognition (NER). Named entities tend to be separated from each other by multiple outside tokens in a text, and thus the first-order CRF, as well as the second-order CRF, may innately lose transition information between distant named entities. The proposed design uses outside label in NER as a transmission medium of precedent entity information on the CRF. Then, empirical results apparently demonstrate that it is possible to exploit long-distance label dependency in the original first-order linear chain CRF structure upon NER while reducing computational loss rather than in the second-order CRF.

To appear in the 7th Named Entities Workshop (co-located with ACL 2018). 2018/07, Melbourne, Australia. (Short paper) 5 pages including 1 reference page, 1 figure