Named Entity Recognition using Cross-lingual Resources: Arabic as an Example

Kareem Darwish

The 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2013)
Sofia, Bulgaria, August 4-9, 2013

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Abstract

Some languages lack large knowledge bases and good discriminative features for Name Entity Recognition (NER) that can generalize to previously unseen named entities. One such language is Arabic, which: a) lacks a capitalization feature; and b) has relatively small knowledge bases, such as Wikipedia. In this work we address both problems by incorporating cross-lingual features and knowledge bases from English using cross-lingual links. We show that such features have a dramatic positive effect on recall. We show the effectiveness of cross-lingual features and resources on a standard dataset as well as on two new test sets that cover both news and microblogs. On the standard dataset, we achieved a 4.1% relative improvement in F-measure over the best reported result in the literature. The features led to improvements of 17.1% and 20.5% on the new news and microblogs test sets respectively.

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