The state-of-the-art named entity recognition (NER) systems are statistical machine learning models that have strong generalization capability (i.e., can recognize unseen entities that do not appear in training data) based on lexical and contextual information. However, such a model could still make mistakes if its features favor a wrong entity type. In this paper, we utilize Wikipedia as an open knowledge base to improve multilingual NER systems. Central to our approach is the construction of high-accuracy, high-coverage multilingual Wikipedia entity type mappings. These mappings are built from weakly annotated data and can be extended to new languages with no human annotation or language-dependent knowledge involved. Based on these mappings, we develop several approaches to improve an NER system. We evaluate the performance of the approaches via experiments on NER systems trained for 6 languages. Experimental results show that the proposed approaches are effective in improving the accuracy of such systems on unseen entities, especially when a system is applied to a new domain or it is trained with little training data (up to 18.3 F1 score improvement).
This paper introduces a new model that uses named entity recognition, coreference resolution, and entity linking techniques, to approach the task of linking people entities on Wikipedia people pages to their corresponding Wikipedia pages if applicable. Our task is different from general and traditional entity linking because we are working in a limited domain, namely, people entities, and we are including pronouns as entities, whereas in the past, pronouns were never considered as entities in entity linking. We have built 2 models, both outperforms our baseline model significantly. The purpose…
In this work, we open up the DAWT dataset - Densely Annotated Wikipedia Texts across multiple languages. The annotations include labeled text mentions mapping to entities (represented by their Freebase machine ids) as well as the type of the entity. The data set contains total of 13.6M articles, 5.0B tokens, 13.8M mention entity co-occurrences. DAWT contains 4.8 times more anchor text to entity links than originally present in the Wikipedia markup. Moreover, it spans several languages including English, Spanish, Italian, German, French and Arabic. We also present the methodology used to genera…
When it comes to factual knowledge about a wide range of domains, Wikipedia is often the prime source of information on the web. DBpedia and YAGO, as large cross-domain knowledge graphs, encode a subset of that knowledge by creating an entity for each page in Wikipedia, and connecting them through edges. It is well known, however, that Wikipedia-based knowledge graphs are far from complete. Especially, as Wikipedia's policies permit pages about subjects only if they have a certain popularity, such graphs tend to lack information about less well-known entities. Information about these entities …
University of Zagreb（萨格勒布大学）；King’s College London（伦敦国王学院）；Leibniz University Hannover（汉诺威莱布尼茨大学）
With the ever-growing popularity of the field of NLP, the demand for datasets in low resourced-languages follows suit. Following a previously established framework, in this paper, we present the UNER dataset, a multilingual and hierarchical parallel corpus annotated for named-entities. We describe in detail the developed procedure necessary to create this type of dataset in any language available on Wikipedia with DBpedia information. The three-step procedure extracts entities from Wikipedia articles, links them to DBpedia, and maps the DBpedia sets of classes to the UNER labels. This is follo…
Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam（波茨坦大学哈索·普拉特纳研究所）；Zerotha Research（Zerotha研究公司）；Cerence GmbH（赛轮思有限公司）；University of Bonn（波恩大学）；University of Dayton（戴顿大学）；Goldman Sachs（高盛集团）
In this paper, we propose CHOLAN, a modular approach to target end-to-end entity linking (EL) over knowledge bases. CHOLAN consists of a pipeline of two transformer-based models integrated sequentially to accomplish the EL task. The first transformer model identifies surface forms (entity mentions) in a given text. For each mention, a second transformer model is employed to classify the target entity among a predefined candidates list. The latter transformer is fed by an enriched context captured from the sentence (i.e. local context), and entity description gained from Wikipedia. Such externa…
Accessing Web archives raises a number of issues caused by their temporal characteristics. Additional knowledge is needed to find and understand older texts. Especially entities mentioned in texts are subject to change. Most severe in terms of information retrieval are name changes. In order to find entities that have changed their name over time, search engines need to be aware of this evolution. We tackle this problem by analyzing Wikipedia in terms of entity evolutions mentioned in articles. We present statistical data on excerpts covering name changes, which will be used to discover simila…
We present Namesakes, a dataset of ambiguously named entities obtained from English-language Wikipedia and news articles. It consists of 58862 mentions of 4148 unique entities and their namesakes: 1000 mentions from news, 28843 from Wikipedia articles about the entity, and 29019 Wikipedia backlink mentions. Namesakes should be helpful in establishing challenging benchmarks for the task of named entity linking (NEL).
Working with Web archives raises a number of issues caused by their temporal characteristics. Depending on the age of the content, additional knowledge might be needed to find and understand older texts. Especially facts about entities are subject to change. Most severe in terms of information retrieval are name changes. In order to find entities that have changed their name over time, search engines need to be aware of this evolution. We tackle this problem by analyzing Wikipedia in terms of entity evolutions mentioned in articles regardless the structural elements. We gathered statistics and…
Michtom School of Computer Science（米赫托姆计算机学院）；Brandeis University（布兰迪斯大学）
We introduce ParaNames, a multilingual parallel name resource consisting of 118 million names spanning across 400 languages. Names are provided for 13.6 million entities which are mapped to standardized entity types (PER/LOC/ORG). Using Wikidata as a source, we create the largest resource of this type to-date. We describe our approach to filtering and standardizing the data to provide the best quality possible. ParaNames is useful for multilingual language processing, both in defining tasks for name translation/transliteration and as supplementary data for tasks such as named entity recognitio…
This paper describes the system proposed by Sabancı University Natural Language Processing Group in the SemEval-2022 MultiCoNER task. We developed an unsupervised entity linking pipeline that detects potential entity mentions with the help of Wikipedia and also uses the corresponding Wikipedia context to help the classifier in finding the named entity type of that mention. Our results showed that our pipeline improved performance significantly, especially for complex entities in low-context settings.
State Key Laboratory of Software Development Environment, Beihang University（北京航空航天大学软件开发环境国家重点实验室）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）；Shandong University（山东大学）
We present a simple yet effective approach for linking entities in queries. The key idea is to search sentences similar to a query from Wikipedia articles and directly use the human-annotated entities in the similar sentences as candidate entities for the query. Then, we employ a rich set of features, such as link-probability, context-matching, word embeddings, and relatedness among candidate entities as well as their related entities, to rank the candidates under a regression based framework. The advantages of our approach lie in two aspects, which contribute to the ranking process and final …
Wiki-TabNER: Integrating Named Entity Recognition into Wikipedia Tables
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich Germany（慕尼黑路德维希-马克西米利安大学）；Siemens AG Munich Germany（西门子股份公司）；Technical University of Munich Munich Germany（慕尼黑技术大学）
Neural document retrievers, including dense passage retrieval (DPR), have outperformed classical lexical-matching retrievers, such as BM25, when fine-tuned and tested on specific question-answering datasets. However, it has been shown that the existing dense retrievers do not generalize well not only out of domain but even in domain such as Wikipedia, especially when a named entity in a question is a dominant clue for retrieval. In this paper, we propose an approach toward in-domain generalization using the embeddings generated by the frozen language model trained with the entities in the doma…
Mohammed VI Polytechnic University（穆罕默德六世理工大学）；Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah University（西迪·穆罕默德·本·阿卜杜拉大学）；University of Sherbrooke（舍布鲁克大学）
Building real-world complex Named Entity Recognition (NER) systems is a challenging task. This is due to the complexity and ambiguity of named entities that appear in various contexts such as short input sentences, emerging entities, and complex entities. Besides, real-world queries are mostly malformed, as they can be code-mixed or multilingual, among other scenarios. In this paper, we introduce our submitted system to the Multilingual Complex Named Entity Recognition (MultiCoNER) shared task. We approach the complex NER for multilingual and code-mixed queries, by relying on the contextualize…
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）
Character-level patterns have been widely used as features in English Named Entity Recognition (NER) systems. However, to date there has been no direct investigation of the inherent differences between name and non-name tokens in text, nor whether this property holds across multiple languages. This paper analyzes the capabilities of corpus-agnostic Character-level Language Models (CLMs) in the binary task of distinguishing name tokens from non-name tokens. We demonstrate that CLMs provide a simple and powerful model for capturing these differences, identifying named entity tokens in a diverse …
Short textual descriptions of entities provide summaries of their key attributes and have been shown to be useful sources of background knowledge for tasks such as entity linking and question answering. However, generating entity descriptions, especially for new and long-tail entities, can be challenging since relevant information is often scattered across multiple sources with varied content and style. We introduce DESCGEN: given mentions spread over multiple documents, the goal is to generate an entity summary description. DESCGEN consists of 37K entity descriptions from Wikipedia and Fandom…
Entity linking is an indispensable operation of populating knowledge repositories for information extraction. It studies on aligning a textual entity mention to its corresponding disambiguated entry in a knowledge repository. In this paper, we propose a new paradigm named distantly supervised entity linking (DSEL), in the sense that the disambiguated entities that belong to a huge knowledge repository (Freebase) are automatically aligned to the corresponding descriptive webpages (Wiki pages). In this way, a large scale of weakly labeled data can be generated without manual annotation and fed t…
Facebook AI（Facebook人工智能研究院）；University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）
We present mGENRE, a sequence-to-sequence system for the Multilingual Entity Linking (MEL) problem -- the task of resolving language-specific mentions to a multilingual Knowledge Base (KB). For a mention in a given language, mGENRE predicts the name of the target entity left-to-right, token-by-token in an autoregressive fashion. The autoregressive formulation allows us to effectively cross-encode mention string and entity names to capture more interactions than the standard dot product between mention and entity vectors. It also enables fast search within a large KB even for mentions that do n…
Named Entities (NEs) are often written with no orthographic changes across different languages that share a common alphabet. We show that this can be leveraged so as to improve named entity recognition (NER) by using unsupervised word clusters from secondary languages as features in state-of-the-art discriminative NER systems. We observe significant increases in performance, finding that person and location identification is particularly improved, and that phylogenetically close languages provide more valuable features than more distant languages.
Identifying named entities is, in general, a practical and challenging task in the field of Natural Language Processing. Named Entity Recognition on the code-mixed text is further challenging due to the linguistic complexity resulting from the nature of the mixing. This paper addresses the submission of team CMNEROne to the SEMEVAL 2022 shared task 11 MultiCoNER. The Code-mixed NER task aimed to identify named entities on the code-mixed dataset. Our work consists of Named Entity Recognition (NER) on the code-mixed dataset by leveraging the multilingual data. We achieved a weighted average F1 s…
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb（萨格勒布大学人文与社会科学学院）
This article presents the application of the Universal Named Entity framework to generate automatically annotated corpora. By using a workflow that extracts Wikipedia data and meta-data and DBpedia information, we generated an English dataset which is described and evaluated. Furthermore, we conducted a set of experiments to improve the annotations in terms of precision, recall, and F1-measure. The final dataset is available and the established workflow can be applied to any language with existing Wikipedia and DBpedia. As part of future research, we intend to continue improving the annotation…
Russian-Armenian University（俄罗斯-亚美尼亚大学）；Ivannikov Institute for System Programming of the Russian Academy of Sciences（俄罗斯科学院伊万尼科夫系统编程研究所）
In this work, we tackle the problem of Armenian named entity recognition, providing silver- and gold-standard datasets as well as establishing baseline results on popular models. We present a 163000-token named entity corpus automatically generated and annotated from Wikipedia, and another 53400-token corpus of news sentences with manual annotation of people, organization and location named entities. The corpora were used to train and evaluate several popular named entity recognition models. Alongside the datasets, we release 50-, 100-, 200-, 300-dimensional GloVe word embeddings trained on a …
Ugglan is a system designed to discover named entities and link them to unique identifiers in a knowledge base. It is based on a combination of a name and nominal dictionary derived from Wikipedia and Wikidata, a named entity recognition module (NER) using fixed ordinally-forgetting encoding (FOFE) trained on the TAC EDL data from 2014-2016, a candidate generation module from the Wikipedia link graph across multiple editions, a PageRank link and cooccurrence graph disambiguator, and finally a reranker trained on the TAC EDL 2015-2016 data.
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Max Planck Institute for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克信息学研究所）
KnowNER is a multilingual Named Entity Recognition (NER) system that leverages different degrees of external knowledge. A novel modular framework divides the knowledge into four categories according to the depth of knowledge they convey. Each category consists of a set of features automatically generated from different information sources (such as a knowledge-base, a list of names or document-specific semantic annotations) and is used to train a conditional random field (CRF). Since those information sources are usually multilingual, KnowNER can be easily trained for a wide range of languages.…
We present a multilingual Named Entity Recognition approach based on a robust and general set of features across languages and datasets. Our system combines shallow local information with clustering semi-supervised features induced on large amounts of unlabeled text. Understanding via empirical experimentation how to effectively combine various types of clustering features allows us to seamlessly export our system to other datasets and languages. The result is a simple but highly competitive system which obtains state of the art results across five languages and twelve datasets. The results ar…
Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team/Coordination Center of China（国家计算机网络应急技术处理协调中心）
Entity and relation extraction is a key task in information extraction, where the output can be used for downstream NLP tasks. Existing approaches for entity and relation extraction tasks mainly focus on the English corpora and ignore other languages. Thus, it is critical to improving performance in a multilingual setting. Meanwhile, multilingual training is usually used to boost cross-lingual performance by transferring knowledge from languages (e.g., high-resource) to other (e.g., low-resource) languages. However, language interference usually exists in multilingual tasks as the model parame…
DynamicNER: A Dynamic, Multilingual, and Fine-Grained Dataset for LLM-based Named Entity Recognition
New York University Abu Dhabi（纽约大学阿布扎赫德分校）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；Nanyang Technology University（南阳技术大学）；University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；Texas A&M University（德克萨斯大学）；Squirrel AI
Neural entity linking models are very powerful, but run the risk of overfitting to the domain they are trained in. For this problem, a domain is characterized not just by genre of text but even by factors as specific as the particular distribution of entities, as neural models tend to overfit by memorizing properties of frequent entities in a dataset. We tackle the problem of building robust entity linking models that generalize effectively and do not rely on labeled entity linking data with a specific entity distribution. Rather than predicting entities directly, our approach models fine-grai…
European Commission – Joint Research Centre（欧洲委员会联合研究中心）
This paper describes a new, freely available, highly multilingual named entity resource for person and organisation names that has been compiled over seven years of large-scale multilingual news analysis combined with Wikipedia mining, resulting in 205,000 per-son and organisation names plus about the same number of spelling variants written in over 20 different scripts and in many more languages. This resource, produced as part of the Europe Media Monitor activity (EMM, http://emm.newsbrief.eu/overview.html), can be used for a number of purposes. These include improving name search in databas…
Named-entities are inherently multilingual, and annotations in any given language may be limited. This motivates us to consider polyglot named-entity recognition (NER), where one model is trained using annotated data drawn from more than one language. However, a straightforward implementation of this simple idea does not always work in practice: naive training of NER models using annotated data drawn from multiple languages consistently underperforms models trained on monolingual data alone, despite having access to more training data. The starting point of this paper is a simple solution to t…
Huawei Turkey Research and Development Center（华为土耳其研发中心）
Turkish Wikipedia Named-Entity Recognition and Text Categorization (TWNERTC) dataset is a collection of automatically categorized and annotated sentences obtained from Wikipedia. We constructed large-scale gazetteers by using a graph crawler algorithm to extract relevant entity and domain information from a semantic knowledge base, Freebase. The constructed gazetteers contains approximately 300K entities with thousands of fine-grained entity types under 77 different domains. Since automated processes are prone to ambiguity, we also introduce two new content specific noise reduction methodologi…
We present MultiCoNER, a large multilingual dataset for Named Entity Recognition that covers 3 domains (Wiki sentences, questions, and search queries) across 11 languages, as well as multilingual and code-mixing subsets. This dataset is designed to represent contemporary challenges in NER, including low-context scenarios (short and uncased text), syntactically complex entities like movie titles, and long-tail entity distributions. The 26M token dataset is compiled from public resources using techniques such as heuristic-based sentence sampling, template extraction and slotting, and machine tra…
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Jiangsu Normal University（江苏师范大学）；Nankai University（南开大学）；Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd（华为技术有限公司）
Entity linking (EL) is the process of linking entity mentions appearing in text with their corresponding entities in a knowledge base. EL features of entities (e.g., prior probability, relatedness score, and entity embedding) are usually estimated based on Wikipedia. However, for newly emerging entities (EEs) which have just been discovered in news, they may still not be included in Wikipedia yet. As a consequence, it is unable to obtain required EL features for those EEs from Wikipedia and EL models will always fail to link ambiguous mentions with those EEs correctly as the absence of their E…
In this paper we present a novel method for retrieving information in languages other than that of the query. We use this technique in combination with existing traditional Cross Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) techniques to improve their results. This method has a number of advantages over traditional techniques that rely on machine translation to translate the query and then search the target document space using a machine translation. This method is not limited to the availability of a machine translation algorithm for the desired language and uses already existing sources of readily …
University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）
Modern entity linking systems rely on large collections of documents specifically annotated for the task (e.g., AIDA CoNLL). In contrast, we propose an approach which exploits only naturally occurring information: unlabeled documents and Wikipedia. Our approach consists of two stages. First, we construct a high recall list of candidate entities for each mention in an unlabeled document. Second, we use the candidate lists as weak supervision to constrain our document-level entity linking model. The model treats entities as latent variables and, when estimated on a collection of unlabelled texts…
We consider a joint information extraction (IE) model, solving named entity recognition, coreference resolution and relation extraction jointly over the whole document. In particular, we study how to inject information from a knowledge base (KB) in such IE model, based on unsupervised entity linking. The used KB entity representations are learned from either (i) hyperlinked text documents (Wikipedia), or (ii) a knowledge graph (Wikidata), and appear complementary in raising IE performance. Representations of corresponding entity linking (EL) candidates are added to text span representations of…
AKSW Research Group（AKSW研究组）；University of Leipzig（莱比锡大学）；Data Science Group（数据科学组）；University of Paderborn（帕德博恩大学）
Entity linking has recently been the subject of a significant body of research. Currently, the best performing approaches rely on trained mono-lingual models. Porting these approaches to other languages is consequently a difficult endeavor as it requires corresponding training data and retraining of the models. We address this drawback by presenting a novel multilingual, knowledge-based agnostic and deterministic approach to entity linking, dubbed MAG. MAG is based on a combination of context-based retrieval on structured knowledge bases and graph algorithms. We evaluate MAG on 23 data sets an…
This work addresses two important questions pertinent to Relation Extraction (RE). First, what are all possible relations that could exist between any two given entity types? Second, how do we define an unambiguous taxonomical (is-a) hierarchy among the identified relations? To address the first question, we use three resources Wikipedia Infobox, Wikidata, and DBpedia. This study focuses on relations between person, organization and location entity types. We exploit Wikidata and DBpedia in a data-driven manner, and Wikipedia Infobox templates manually to generate lists of relations. Further, t…
Universal NER v2: Towards a Massively Multilingual Named Entity Recognition Benchmark
Northeastern University, USA（东北大学）；Duolingo, USA（Duolingo）；Comenius University Bratislava, Slovakia（布拉迪斯拉发康门尼大学）；University of British Columbia, Canada（不列颠哥伦比亚大学）；Alpinference, France（Alpinference）；Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Romanian Academy, Romania（罗马尼亚科学院人工智能研究所）；University of Ljubljana, Slovenia（卢布尔雅那大学）；Aristotle University of Thessaloniki / ILSP, Athena Research Center, Greece（雅典纳基大学 / ILSP, 雅典研究中心）；Universitas Pelita Harapan, Indonesia（佩利塔哈盼望大学）；Seoul National University, South Korea（首尔国立大学）；Independent Researcher, South Korea（韩国独立研究员）；Democritus University of Thrace, Greece（特拉布宗大学）；Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel（贝尼·格里大学）
本文提出Universal NER v2，旨在构建多语言命名实体识别基准数据集，通过通用标签集和详尽标注指南实现标准化跨语言标注，提升多语言NER评估的准确性与一致性。
For a news content distribution platform like Dailyhunt, Named Entity Recognition is a pivotal task for building better user recommendation and notification algorithms. Apart from identifying names, locations, organisations from the news for 13+ Indian languages and use them in algorithms, we also need to identify n-grams which do not necessarily fit in the definition of Named-Entity, yet they are important. For example, "me too movement", "beef ban", "alwar mob lynching". In this exercise, given an English language text, we are trying to detect case-less n-grams which convey important informa…
We propose a new formulation for multilingual entity linking, where language-specific mentions resolve to a language-agnostic Knowledge Base. We train a dual encoder in this new setting, building on prior work with improved feature representation, negative mining, and an auxiliary entity-pairing task, to obtain a single entity retrieval model that covers 100+ languages and 20 million entities. The model outperforms state-of-the-art results from a far more limited cross-lingual linking task. Rare entities and low-resource languages pose challenges at this large-scale, so we advocate for an incr…
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
Entity linking (EL) is the task of linking entity mentions in a document to referent entities in a knowledge base (KB). Many previous studies focus on Wikipedia-derived KBs. There is little work on EL over Wikidata, even though it is the most extensive crowdsourced KB. The scale of Wikidata can open up many new real-world applications, but its massive number of entities also makes EL challenging. To effectively narrow down the search space, we propose a novel candidate retrieval paradigm based on entity profiling. Wikidata entities and their textual fields are first indexed into a text search …
Although the vast majority of knowledge bases KBs are heavily biased towards English, Wikipedias do cover very different topics in different languages. Exploiting this, we introduce a new multilingual dataset (X-WikiRE), framing relation extraction as a multilingual machine reading problem. We show that by leveraging this resource it is possible to robustly transfer models cross-lingually and that multilingual support significantly improves (zero-shot) relation extraction, enabling the population of low-resourced KBs from their well-populated counterparts.
Pune Institute of Computer Technology（浦那计算机技术学院）；L3Cube；Indian Institute of Technology Madras（印度理工学院马德拉斯分校）
Named entity recognition (NER) is the process of recognising and classifying important information (entities) in text. Proper nouns, such as a person's name, an organization's name, or a location's name, are examples of entities. The NER is one of the important modules in applications like human resources, customer support, search engines, content classification, and academia. In this work, we consider NER for low-resource Indian languages like Hindi and Marathi. The transformer-based models have been widely used for NER tasks. We consider different variations of BERT like base-BERT, RoBERTa, …
Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；University of Rochester（罗切斯特大学）
We present LOME, a system for performing multilingual information extraction. Given a text document as input, our core system identifies spans of textual entity and event mentions with a FrameNet (Baker et al., 1998) parser. It subsequently performs coreference resolution, fine-grained entity typing, and temporal relation prediction between events. By doing so, the system constructs an event and entity focused knowledge graph. We can further apply third-party modules for other types of annotation, like relation extraction. Our (multilingual) first-party modules either outperform or are competi…
YoNER: A New Yorùbá Multi-domain Named Entity Recognition Dataset
University of Ibadan（伊巴丹大学）；Saarland University（萨尔大学）；Atiba University（阿提巴大学）；Mila - Quebec AI Institute（Mila - 魁北克人工智能研究所）；McGill University（麦吉尔大学）；Canada CIFAR AI Chair（加拿大CIFAR人工智能主席）
