We explore the use of Wikipedia as external knowledge to improve named entity recognition (NER). Our method retrieves the corresponding Wikipedia entry for each candidate word sequence and extracts a category label from the first sentence of the entry, which can be thought of as a definition part. These category labels are used as features in a CRF-based NE tagger. We demonstrate using the CoNLL 2003 dataset that the Wikipedia category labels extracted by such a simple method actually improve the accuracy of NER.
REF used Wikipedia as external resource to boost the performance of an CRF-based NE tagger.
Exploiting Wikipedia as External Knowledge for Named Entity Recognition
2007 Joint Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and Computational Natural Language Learning (EMNLP-CoNLL)
Computer Science