Unsupervised cross-domain named entity recognition using entity-aware adversarial training.

Journal: Neural networks : the official journal of the International Neural Network Society
Published Date:

Abstract

The success of neural network based methods in named entity recognition (NER) is heavily relied on abundant manual labeled data. However, these NER methods are unavailable when the data is fully-unlabeled in a new domain. To address the problem, we propose an unsupervised cross-domain model which leverages labeled data from source domain to predict entities in unlabeled target domain. To relieve the distribution divergence when transferring knowledge from source to target domain, we apply adversarial training. Furthermore, we design an entity-aware attention module to guide the adversarial training to reduce the discrepancy of entity features between different domains. Experimental results demonstrate that our model outperforms other methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Authors

  • Qi Peng
    School of Software Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China; Key Laboratory of Big Data and Intelligent Robot (South China University of Technology), Ministry of Education, Guangzhou, China. Electronic address: se_pengqi@mail.scut.edu.cn.
  • Changmeng Zheng
    School of Software Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China; Key Laboratory of Big Data and Intelligent Robot (South China University of Technology), Ministry of Education, Guangzhou, China. Electronic address: sethecharm@mail.scut.edu.cn.
  • Yi Cai
    College of Veterinary Medicine, Hebei Agricultural University, Baoding, Hebei 071000, China.
  • Tao Wang
    Department of Urology, Tongji Hospital, Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China.
  • Haoran Xie
    Department of Mathematics and Information Technology, The Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, Hong Kong, Special Administrative Region of China.
  • Qing Li
    Department of Internal Medicine, University of Michigan Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA.