A lattice-transformer-graph deep learning model for Chinese named entity recognition

Named entity recognition (NER) is the localization and classification of entities with specific meanings in text data, usually used for applications such as relation extraction, question answering, etc. Chinese is a language with Chinese characters as the basic unit, but a Chinese named entity is normally a word containing several characters, so both the relationships between words and those between characters play an important role in Chinese NER. At present, a large number of studies have demonstrated that reasonable word information can effectively improve deep learning models for Chinese NER. Besides, graph convolution can help deep learning models perform better for sequence labeling. Therefore, in this article, we combine word information and graph convolution and propose our Lattice-Transformer-Graph (LTG) deep learning model for Chinese NER. The proposed model pays more attention to additional word information through position-attention, and therefore can learn relationships between characters by using lattice-transformer. Moreover, the adapted graph convolutional layer enables the model to learn both richer character relationships and word relationships and hence helps to recognize Chinese named entities better. Our experiments show that compared with 12 other state-of-the-art models, LTG achieves the best results on the public datasets of Microsoft Research Asia, Resume, and WeiboNER, with the F1 score of 95.89%, 96.81%, and 72.32%, respectively.