A Generic Classifier-Ensemble Approach for Biomedical Named Entity Recognition

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AbstractIn named entity recognition (NER) for biomedical literature, approaches based on combined classifiers have demonstrated great performance improvement compared to a single (best) classifier. This is mainly owed to sufficient level of diversity exhibited among classifiers, which is a selective property of classifier set. Given a large number of classifiers, how to select different classifiers to put into a classifier-ensemble is a crucial issue of multiple classifier-ensemble design. With this observation in mind, we proposed a generic genetic classifier-ensemble method for the classifier selection in biomedical NER. Various diversity measures and majority voting are considered, and disjoint feature subsets are selected to construct individual classifiers. A basic type of individual classifier – Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier is adopted as SVM-classifier committee. A multi-objective Genetic algorithm (GA) is employed as the classifier selector to facilitate the ensemble classifier to improve the overall sample classification accuracy. The proposed approach is tested on the benchmark dataset – GENIA version 3.02 corpus, and compared with both individual best SVM classifier and SVM-classifier ensemble algorithm as well as other machine learning methods such as CRF, HMM and MEMM. The results show that the proposed approach outperforms other classification algorithms and can be a useful method for the biomedical NER problem.KeywordsSupport Vector MachineHide Markov ModelNatural Language ProcessingEnsemble MethodConditional Random FieldThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.