Improving the Scalability of Semi-Markov Conditional Random Fields for Named Entity Recognition

摘要

This paper presents techniques to apply semi-CRFs to Named Entity Recognition tasks with a tractable computational cost. Our framework can handle an NER task that has long named entities and many labels which increase the computational cost. To reduce the computational cost, we propose two techniques: the first is the use of feature forests, which enables us to pack feature-equivalent states, and the second is the introduction of a filtering process which significantly reduces the number of candidate states. This framework allows us to use a rich set of features extracted from the chunk-based representation that can capture informative characteristics of entities. We also introduce a simple trick to transfer information about distant entities by embedding label information into non-entity labels. Experimental results show that our model achieves an F-score of 71.48% on the JNLPBA 2004 shared task without using any external resources or post-processing techniques.