Integrated Model for Morphological Analysis and Named Entity Recognition Based on Label Attention Networks in Korean

Abstract

In well-spaced Korean sentences, morphological analysis is the first step in natural language processing, in which a Korean sentence is segmented into a sequence of morphemes and the parts of speech of the segmented morphemes are determined. Named entity recognition is a natural language processing task carried out to obtain morpheme sequences with specific meanings, such as person, location, and organization names. Although morphological analysis and named entity recognition are closely associated with each other, they have been independently studied and have exhibited the inevitable error propagation problem. Hence, we propose an integrated model based on label attention networks that simultaneously performs morphological analysis and named entity recognition. The proposed model comprises two layers of neural network models that are closely associated with each other. The lower layer performs a morphological analysis, whereas the upper layer performs a named entity recognition. In our experiments using a public gold-labeled dataset, the proposed model outperformed previous state-of-the-art models used for morphological analysis and named entity recognition. Furthermore, the results indicated that the integrated architecture could alleviate the error propagation problem.