Arabic named entity recognition in social media based on BiLSTM-CRF using an attention mechanismShow others and affiliations
2022 (English)In: Journal of Intelligent & Fuzzy Systems, ISSN 1064-1246, E-ISSN 1875-8967, Vol. 42, no 6, p. 5427-5436Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]
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.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
IOS Press IOS Press, 2022. Vol. 42, no 6, p. 5427-5436
Keywords [en]
Arabic named entity recognition (ANER), natural language processing (NLP), multi-head self-attention, BiLSTM, CRF, dialect arabic, social media
National Category
Natural Language Processing
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-474816DOI: 10.3233/JIFS-211944ISI: 000790690300044OAI: oai:DiVA.org:uu-474816DiVA, id: diva2:1660606
2022-05-242022-05-242025-02-07Bibliographically approved