Named Entity Recognition for Novel Types by Transfer Learning

Lizhen Qu1, Gabriela Ferraro1, Liyuan Zhou1, Weiwei Hou1, Timothy Baldwin2
1Data61, 2The University of Melbourne


Abstract

In named entity recognition, we often don’t have a large in-domain training corpus or a knowledge base with adequate coverage to train a model directly. In this paper, we propose a method where, given training data in a related domain with similar (but not identical) named entity (NE) types and a small amount of in-domain training data, we use transfer learning to learn a domain-specific NE model. That is, the novelty in the task setup is that we assume not just domain mismatch, but also label mismatch.