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A Semi-automatic and low-cost method to learn patterns for named entity recognition*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 June 2017

M. MARRERO  and
J. URBANO
M. MARRERO
Affiliation:
Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Carrer de Jordi Girona, 29-31, 08034 Barcelona, Spain e-mail: marrero.monica@gmail.com
J. URBANO
Affiliation:
Delft University of Technology, Mekelweg 4, 2628 CD Delft, The Netherlands e-mail: urbano.julian@gmail.com
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Abstract

Named Entity Recognition is a basic task in Information Extraction that aims at identifying entities of interest within full text documents. The patterns used to recognize entities can be rule based, as in the popular JAPE system. However, hand-crafting effective patterns is often difficult, and yet there is little research devoted to methods capable of learning human-readable patterns, possibly with arbitrary sets of features. In this paper, we present a semi-automatic method to generate both regular expressions and a subset of the JAPE language. It does not need a corpus annotated beforehand. Instead, it employs active learning and combines clustering with an algorithm that finds alignments between symbols present in the entities discovered during the learning process. The method currently supports a fixed set of character features and an arbitrary set of token features, but it can incorporate other kinds of features as well. Through several experiments with an English corpus, we show the ability of the method to generate effective patterns at a low annotation cost, and how it can successfully help in the annotation of brand new corpora.

Type
Articles
Information
Natural Language Engineering , Volume 24 , Issue 1 , January 2018 , pp. 39 - 75
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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Footnotes

*

This work was partially supported by the Spanish Government through a Juan de la Cierva fellowship and project MDM-2015-0502. We specially thank Jorge Morato and Sonia Sánchez for their advice, as well as the anonymous reviewers for their suggestions.

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