Recently , many works have tried to augment the performance of Chinese named entity recognition ( NER ) using word lexicons . As a representative , Lattice-LSTM ( Zhang and Yang , 2018 ) has achieved new benchmark results on several public Chinese NER datasets . However , Lattice-LSTM has a complex model architecture . This limits its application in many industrial areas where real-time NER responses are needed . In this work , we propose a simple but effective method for incorporating the word lexicon into the character representations . This method avoids designing a complicated sequence modeling architecture , and for any neural NER model , it requires only subtle adjustment of the character representation layer to introduce the lexicon information . Experimental studies on four benchmark Chinese NER datasets show that our method achieves an inference speed up to 6.15 times faster than those of state-ofthe-art methods , along with a better performance . The experimental results also show that the proposed method can be easily incorporated with pre-trained models like BERT . 1 Named Entity Recognition ( NER ) is concerned with the identification of named entities , such as persons , locations , and organizations , in unstructured text . NER plays an important role in many downstream tasks , including knowledge base construction ( Riedel et al . , 2013 ) , information retrieval ( Chen et al . , 2015 ) , and question answering ( Diefenbach et al . , 2018 ) . In languages where words are naturally separated ( e.g. , English ) , NER has been conventionally formulated as a sequence labeling problem , and the state-of-the-art results have been achieved using neural-network-based models ( Huang et al . , 2015 ; Chiu and Nichols , 2016 ; Liu et al . , 2018 ) . Compared with NER in English , Chinese NER is more difficult since sentences in Chinese are not naturally segmented . Thus , a common practice for Chinese NER is to first perform word segmentation using an existing CWS system and then apply a word-level sequence labeling model to the segmented sentence ( Yang et al . , 2016 ; He and Sun , 2017b ) . However , it is inevitable that the CWS system will incorrectly segment query sentences . This will result in errors in the detection of entity boundary and the prediction of entity category in NER . Therefore , some approaches resort to performing Chinese NER directly at the character level , which has been empirically proven to be effective ( He and Wang , 2008 ; Liu et al . , 2010 ; Li et al . , 2014 ; Liu et al . , 2019 ; Sui et al . , 2019 ; Gui et al . , 2019b ; Ding et al . , 2019 ) . A drawback of the purely character-based NER method is that the word information is not fully exploited . With this consideration , Zhang and Yang , ( 2018 ) proposed Lattice-LSTM for incorporating word lexicons into the character-based NER model . Moreover , rather than heuristically choosing a word for the character when it matches multiple words in the lexicon , the authors proposed to preserve all words that match the character , leaving the subsequent NER model to determine which word to apply . To realize this idea , they introduced an elaborate modification to the sequence modeling layer of the LSTM-CRF model ( Huang et al . , 2015 ) . Experimental studies on four Chinese NER datasets have verified the effectiveness of Lattice-LSTM . However , the model architecture of Lattice-LSTM is quite complicated . In order to introduce lexicon information , Lattice-LSTM adds several additional edges between nonadjacent characters in the input sequence , which significantly slows its training and inference speeds . In addition , it is difficult to transfer the structure of Lattice-LSTM to other neural-network architectures ( e.g. , convolutional neural networks and transformers ) that may be more suitable for some specific tasks . In this work , we propose a simpler method to realize the idea of Lattice-LSTM , i.e. , incorporating all the matched words for each character to a character-based NER model . The first principle of our model design is to achieve a fast inference speed . To this end , we propose to encode lexicon information in the character representations , and we design the encoding scheme to preserve as much of the lexicon matching results as possible . Compared with Lattice-LSTM , our method avoids the need for a complicated model architecture , is easier to implement , and can be quickly adapted to any appropriate neural NER model by adjusting the character representation layer . In addition , ablation studies show the superiority of our method in incorporating more complete and distinct lexicon information , as well as introducing a more effective word-weighting strategy . The contributions of this work can be summarized as follows : • We propose a simple but effective method for incorporating word lexicons into the character representations for Chinese NER . • The proposed method is transferable to different sequence-labeling architectures and can be easily incorporated with pre-trained models like BERT ( Devlin et al . , 2018 ) . We performed experiments on four public Chinese NER datasets . The experimental results show that when implementing the sequence modeling layer with a single-layer Bi-LSTM , our method achieves considerable improvements over the state-of-theart methods in both inference speed and sequence labeling performance . In this work , we addressed the computational efficiency of utilizing word lexicons in Chinese NER . To obtain a high-performing Chinese NER system with a fast inference speed , we proposed a novel method to incorporate the lexicon information into the character representations . Experimental studies on four benchmark Chinese NER datasets reveal that our method can achieve a much faster inference speed and better performance than the compared state-of-the-art methods .

Challenge: Named entity recognition in Chinese requires word segmentation causes errors or character-level model with lexical features that is complex and expensive.
Approach: They propose to encode lexicon features into character representations so it can keep the system simpler and achieve faster inference than previous models.
Outcome: The proposed efficient character-based LSTM method with lexical features achieves 6.15 times faster inference speed and better performance than previous models.