Abstract: Named Entity Recognition (NER) has been studied for many languages like English, German, Spanish, and others but virtually no studies have focused on the Nepali language. One key reason is the lack of an appropriate, annotated dataset. In this paper, we describe a Nepali NER dataset that we created. We discuss and compare the performance of various machine learning models on this dataset. We also propose a novel NER scheme for Nepali and show that this scheme, based on grapheme-level representations, outperforms character-level representations when combined with BiLSTM models. Our best models obtain an overall F1 score of 86.89, which is a significant improvement on previously reported performance in literature.

Introduction: Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a foremost NLP task to label each atomic elements of a sentence into specific categories like "PERSON", "LOCATION", "ORGANIZATION" and othersBIBREF0. There has been an extensive NER research on English, German, Dutch and Spanish language BIBREF1, BIBREF2, BIBREF3, BIBREF4, BIBREF5, and notable research on low resource South Asian languages like HindiBIBREF6, IndonesianBIBREF7 and other Indian languages (Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu)BIBREF8. However, there has been no study on developing neural NER for Nepali language. In this paper, we propose a neural based Nepali NER using latest state-of-the-art architecture based on grapheme-level which doesn't require any hand-crafted features and no data pre-processing. Recent neural architecture like BIBREF1 is used to relax the need to hand-craft the features and need to use part-of-speech tag to determine the category of the entity. However, this architecture have been studied for languages like English, and German and not been applied to languages like Nepali which is a low resource language i.e limited data set to train the model. Traditional methods like Hidden Markov Model (HMM) with rule based approachesBIBREF9,BIBREF10, and Support Vector Machine (SVM) with manual feature-engineeringBIBREF11 have been applied but they perform poor compared to neural. However, there has been no research in Nepali NER using neural network. Therefore, we created the named entity annotated dataset partly with the help of Dataturk to train a neural model. The texts used for this dataset are collected from various daily news sources from Nepal around the year 2015-2016. Following are our contributions: We present a novel Named Entity Recognizer (NER) for Nepali language. To best of our knowledge we are the first to propose neural based Nepali NER. As there are not good quality dataset to train NER we release a dataset to support future research We perform empirical evaluation of our model with state-of-the-art models with relative improvement of upto 10% In this paper, we present works similar to ours in Section SECREF2. We describe our approach and dataset statistics in Section SECREF3 and SECREF4, followed by our experiments, evaluation and discussion in Section SECREF5, SECREF6, and SECREF7. We conclude with our observations in Section SECREF8. To facilitate further research our code and dataset will be made available at github.com/link-yet-to-be-updated

Question: How many different types of entities exist in the dataset?
Answer: OurNepali contains 3 different types of entities, ILPRL contains 4 different types of entities