Complex Entity Recognition Based on Prior Semantic Knowledge and Type Embedding

Entity recognition is a key task of information extraction. With the development of information extraction technology, researchers turn the research direction from the recognition of simple entities to the recognition of complex ones. Complex entities usually have no explicit features, and they are more complicated in syntactic constructions and parts of speech, which makes the recognition of complex entities a great challenge. In addition, existing models widely use span-based methods to identify nested entities. As a result, they always have an ambiguity in the detection of entity boundaries, which affects recognition performance. In response to the above challenge and problem, this study proposes an entity recognition model GIA-2DPE based on prior semantic knowledge and type embedding. The model uses keyword sequences of entity categories as prior semantic knowledge to improve the cognition of entities, utilizes type embedding to capture potential features of different entity types, and then combines prior knowledge with entity-type features through the gated interactive attention mechanism to assist in the recognition of complex entities. Moreover, the model uses 2D probability encoding to predict entity boundaries and combines boundary features and contextual features to enhance accurate boundary detection, thereby improving the performance of nested entity recognition. This study conducts extensive experiments on seven English datasets and two Chinese datasets. The results show that GIA-2DPE outperforms state-of-the-art models and achieves a 10.4% F1 boost compared with the baseline in entity recognition tasks on the ScienceIE dataset. © 2023 Chinese Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.