Arabic named entity recognition in social media based on BiLSTM-CRF using an attention mechanism

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a vitally important task of Natural Language Processing (NLP), which aims at finding named entities in natural language text and classifying them into predefined categories such as persons (PER), places (LOC), organizations (ORG), and so on. In the Arabic context, the current NER approaches based on deep learning are mainly based on word embedding or character-level embedding as input. However, using a single granularity representation has problems with out-of-vocabulary (OOV), word embedding errors, and relatively simple semantic content. This paper presents a multi-headed self-attention mechanism implemented in the BiLSTM-CRF neural network structure to recognize Arabic named entities on social media using two embeddings. Unlike other state-of-the-art approaches, this approach combines character and word embedding at the embedding layer, and the attention mechanism calculates the similarity over the entire sequence of characters and captures local context information. The proposed approach better recognized NEs in Dialect Arabic, reaching an F1 value of 74.15% on Darwish's dataset (a publicly available Arabic NER benchmark for social media). According to our knowledge, our findings outperform the current state-of-the-art models for Arabic Named Entity Recognition on social media.