Abstract: Recently, many works have tried to utilizing word lexicon to augment the performance of Chinese named entity recognition (NER). As a representative work in this line, Lattice-LSTM \cite{zhang2018chinese} has achieved new state-of-the-art performance on several benchmark Chinese NER datasets. However, Lattice-LSTM suffers from a complicated model architecture, resulting in low computational efficiency. This will heavily limit its application in many industrial areas, which require real-time NER response. In this work, we ask the question: if we can simplify the usage of lexicon and, at the same time, achieve comparative performance with Lattice-LSTM for Chinese NER?  ::: Started with this question and motivated by the idea of Lattice-LSTM, we propose a concise but effective method to incorporate the lexicon information into the vector representations of characters. This way, our method can avoid introducing a complicated sequence modeling architecture to model the lexicon information. Instead, it only needs to subtly adjust the character representation layer of the neural sequence model. Experimental study on four benchmark Chinese NER datasets shows that our method can achieve much faster inference speed, comparative or better performance over Lattice-LSTM and its follwees. It also shows that our method can be easily transferred across difference neural architectures.

Introduction: Named Entity Recognition (NER) is concerned with identifying named entities, such as person, location, product, and organization names, in unstructured text. In languages where words are naturally separated (e.g., English), NER was conventionally formulated as a sequence labeling problem, and the state-of-the-art results have been achieved by those neural-network-based models BIBREF1, BIBREF2, BIBREF3, BIBREF4. Compared with NER in English, Chinese NER is more difficult since sentences in Chinese are not previously segmented. Thus, one common practice in Chinese NER is first performing word segmentation using an existing CWS system and then applying a word-level sequence labeling model to the segmented sentence BIBREF5, BIBREF6. However, it is inevitable that the CWS system will wrongly segment the query sequence. This will, in turn, result in entity boundary detection errors and even entity category prediction errors in the following NER. Take the character sequence “南京市 (Nanjing) / 长江大桥 (Yangtze River Bridge)" as an example, where “/" indicates the gold segmentation result. If the sequence is segmented into “南京 (Nanjing) / 市长 (mayor) / 江大桥 (Daqiao Jiang)", the word-based NER system is definitely not able to correctly recognize “南京市 (Nanjing)" and “长江大桥 (Yangtze River Bridge)" as two entities of the location type. Instead, it is possible to incorrectly treat “南京 (Nanjing)" as a location entity and predict “江大桥 (Daqiao Jiang)" to be a person's name. Therefore, some works resort to performing Chinese NER directly on the character level, and it has been shown that this practice can achieve better performance BIBREF7, BIBREF8, BIBREF9, BIBREF0. A drawback of the purely character-based NER method is that word information, which has been proved to be useful, is not fully exploited. With this consideration, BIBREF0 proposed to incorporating word lexicon into the character-based NER model. In addition, instead of heuristically choosing a word for the character if it matches multiple words of the lexicon, they proposed to preserving all matched words of the character, leaving the following NER model to determine which matched word to apply. To achieve this, they introduced an elaborate modification to the LSTM-based sequence modeling layer of the LSTM-CRF model BIBREF1 to jointly model the character sequence and all of its matched words. Experimental studies on four public Chinese NER datasets show that Lattice-LSTM can achieve comparative or better performance on Chinese NER over existing methods. Although successful, there exists a big problem in Lattice-LSTM that limits its application in many industrial areas, where real-time NER responses are needed. That is, its model architecture is quite complicated. This slows down its inference speed and makes it difficult to perform training and inference in parallel. In addition, it is far from easy to transfer the structure of Lattice-LSTM to other neural-network architectures (e.g., convolutional neural networks and transformers), which may be more suitable for some specific datasets. In this work, we aim to find a easier way to achieve the idea of Lattice-LSTM, i.e., incorporating all matched words of the sentence to the character-based NER model. The first principle of our method design is to achieve a fast inference speed. To this end, we propose to encoding the matched words, obtained from the lexicon, into the representations of characters. Compared with Lattice-LSTM, this method is more concise and easier to implement. It can avoid complicated model architecture design thus has much faster inference speed. It can also be quickly adapted to any appropriate neural architectures without redesign. Given an existing neural character-based NER model, we only have to modify its character representation layer to successfully introduce the word lexicon. In addition, experimental studies on four public Chinese NER datasets show that our method can even achieve better performance than Lattice-LSTM when applying the LSTM-CRF model. Our source code is published at https://github.com/v-mipeng/LexiconAugmentedNER.

Question: What is the metric that is measures in this paper?
Answer: error rate in a minimal pair ABX discrimination task