Neural Entity Reasoner for Global Consistency in NER

Abstract: We propose Neural Entity Reasoner (NE-Reasoner), a framework to introduce global consistency of recognized entities into Neural Reasoner over Named Entity Recognition (NER) task. Given an input sentence, the NE-Reasoner layer can infer over multiple entities to increase the global consistency of output labels, which then be transfered into entities for the input of next layer. NE-Reasoner inherits and develops some features from Neural Reasoner 1) a symbolic memory, allowing it to exchange entities between layers. 2) the specific interaction-pooling mechanism, allowing it to connect each local word to multiple global entities, and 3) the deep architecture, allowing it to bootstrap the recognized entity set from coarse to fine. Like human beings, NE-Reasoner is able to accommodate ambiguous words and Name Entities that rarely or never met before. Despite the symbolic information the model introduced, NE-Reasoner can still be trained effectively in an end-to-end manner via parameter sharing strategy. NE-Reasoner can outperform conventional NER models in most cases on both English and Chinese NER datasets. For example, it achieves state-of-art on CoNLL-2003 English NER dataset.