CWPC_BiAtt: Character–Word–Position Combined BiLSTM-Attention for Chinese Named Entity Recognition

Abstract

Usually taken as linguistic features by Part-Of-Speech (POS) tagging, Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a major task in Natural Language Processing (NLP). In this paper, we put forward a new comprehensive-embedding, considering three aspects, namely character-embedding, word-embedding, and pos-embedding stitched in the order we give, and thus get their dependencies, based on which we propose a new Character–Word–Position Combined BiLSTM-Attention (CWPC_BiAtt) for the Chinese NER task. Comprehensive-embedding via the Bidirectional Llong Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) layer can get the connection between the historical and future information, and then employ the attention mechanism to capture the connection between the content of the sentence at the current position and that at any location. Finally, we utilize Conditional Random Field (CRF) to decode the entire tagging sequence. Experiments show that CWPC_BiAtt model we proposed is well qualified for the NER task on Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA) dataset and Weibo NER corpus. A high precision and recall were obtained, which verified the stability of the model. Position-embedding in comprehensive-embedding can compensate for attention-mechanism to provide position information for the disordered sequence, which shows that comprehensive-embedding has completeness. Looking at the entire model, our proposed CWPC_BiAtt has three distinct characteristics: completeness, simplicity, and stability. Our proposed CWPC_BiAtt model achieved the highest F-score, achieving the state-of-the-art performance in the MSRA dataset and Weibo NER corpus.