Abstract

Named entity recognition (NER) is a crucial task for NLP, which aims to extract information from texts. To build NER systems, deep learning (DL) models are learned with dictionary features by mapping each word in the dataset to dictionary features and generating a unique index. However, this technique might generate noisy labels, which pose significant challenges for the NER task. In this paper, we proposed DL-dictionary features, and evaluated them on two datasets, including the OntoNotes 5.0 dataset and our new infectious disease outbreak dataset named GFID. We used (1) a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) character and (2) pre-trained embedding to concatenate with (3) our proposed features, named the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), BiLSTM, and self-attention dictionaries, respectively. The combined features (1-3) were fed through BiLSTM - Conditional Random Field (CRF) to predict named entity classes as outputs. We compared these outputs with other predictions of the BiLSTM character, pre-trained embedding, and dictionary features from previous research, which used the exact matching and partial matching dictionary technique. The findings showed that the model employing our dictionary features outperformed other models that used existing dictionary features. We also computed the F1 score with the GFID dataset to apply this technique to extract medical or healthcare information.