Unsupervised cross-domain named entity recognition using entity-aware adversarial training

Abstract

The success of neural network based methods in named entity recognition (NER) is heavily relied on abundant manual labeled data. However, these NER methods are unavailable when the data is fully-unlabeled in a new domain. To address the problem, we propose an unsupervised cross-domain model which leverages labeled data from source domain to predict entities in unlabeled target domain. To relieve the distribution divergence when transferring knowledge from source to target domain, we apply adversarial training. Furthermore, we design an entity-aware attention module to guide the adversarial training to reduce the discrepancy of entity features between different domains. Experimental results demonstrate that our model outperforms other methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Keywords: Adversarial training; Entity-aware attention; Named entity recognition; Unsupervised cross-domain.