MCA-NER: Multi-Contextualized Adversarial-Based Attentional Deep Neural Network for Named Entity Recognition

Abstract

Multi-contextualized representations learning is vital for named entity recognition (NER), which is a fundamental task for effectively extracting structured information from unstructured text, and forming knowledge bases. This task is particularly challenging when dealing with Chinese text given the absence of evident word boundaries. Chinese word segmentation (CWS) can be leveraged to recognize word boundaries, but named entities often encompass multiple segmented words, making it crucial to use boundary information to correctly recognize and distinguish the relationships between these words. In this paper, we propose MCA-NER, a multi-contextualized adversarial-based attentional deep learning approach for Chinese NER, which combines CWS and part-of-speech (POS) tagging information with the classic BiLSTM-CRF NER model, using adversarial multi-task learning. The model incorporates several self-attention components for adversarial and multi-task learning, effectively synthesizing task-specific and common information attribution while improving performance across all three tasks. Experimental results on the three datasets provide compelling evidence that supports the effectiveness and performance of our model.