Kcr-FLAT: A Chinese-Named Entity Recognition Model with Enhanced Semantic Information

Sensors (Basel). 2023 Feb 4;23(4):1771. doi: 10.3390/s23041771.

Abstract

The performance of Chinese-named entity recognition (NER) has improved via word enhancement or new frameworks that incorporate various types of external data. However, for Chinese NER, syntactic composition (in sentence level) and inner regularity (in character-level) have rarely been studied. Chinese characters are highly sensitive to sentential syntactic data. The same Chinese character sequence can be decomposed into different combinations of words according to how they are used and placed in the context. In addition, the same type of entities usually have the same naming rules due to the specificity of the Chinese language structure. This paper presents a Kcr-FLAT to improve the performance of Chinese NER with enhanced semantic information. Specifically, we first extract different types of syntactic data, functionalize the syntactic information by a key-value memory network (KVMN), and fuse them by attention mechanism. Then the syntactic information and lexical information are integrated by a cross-transformer. Finally, we use an inner regularity perception module to capture the internal regularity of each entity for better entity type prediction. The experimental results show that with F1 scores as the evaluation index, the proposed model obtains 96.51%, 96.81%, and 70.12% accuracy rates on MSRA, resume, and Weibo datasets, respectively.

Keywords: Chinese-named entity recognition; cross-transformer; regularity perception; semantic information; syntactic information.