A neural network multi-task learning approach to biomedical named entity recognition.

Journal: BMC bioinformatics
Published Date:

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a key task in biomedical text mining. Accurate NER systems require task-specific, manually-annotated datasets, which are expensive to develop and thus limited in size. Since such datasets contain related but different information, an interesting question is whether it might be possible to use them together to improve NER performance. To investigate this, we develop supervised, multi-task, convolutional neural network models and apply them to a large number of varied existing biomedical named entity datasets. Additionally, we investigated the effect of dataset size on performance in both single- and multi-task settings.

Authors

  • Gamal Crichton
    Language Technology Laboratory, DTAL, University of Cambridge, 9 West Road, Cambridge, CB39DB, UK. gkoc2@cam.ac.uk.
  • Sampo Pyysalo
  • Billy Chiu
    Language Technology Laboratory, DTAL, University of Cambridge, 9 West Road, Cambridge, CB39DB, UK.
  • Anna Korhonen
    Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, JJ Thompson Avenue, Cambridge, UK. alk23@cam.ac.uk.