In this article, we report the search capability of Genetic Algorithm (GA) to construct a weighted vote-based classifier ensemble for Named Entity Recognition (NER). Our underlying assumption is that the reliability of predictions of each classifier differs among the various named entity (NE) classes. Thus, it is necessary to quantify the amount of voting of a particular classifier for a particular output class. Here, an attempt is made to determine the appropriate weights of voting for each class in each classifier using GA. The proposed technique is evaluated for four leading Indian languages, namely Bengali, Hindi, Telugu, and Oriya, which are all resource-poor in nature. Evaluation results yield the recall, precision and F-measure values of 92.08%, 92.22%, and 92.15%, respectively for Bengali; 96.07%, 88.63%, and 92.20%, respectively for Hindi; 78.82%, 91.26%, and 84.59%, respectively for Telugu; and 88.56%, 89.98%, and 89.26%, respectively for Oriya. Finally, we evaluate our proposed approach with the benchmark dataset of CoNLL-2003 shared task that yields the overall recall, precision, and F-measure values of 88.72%, 88.64%, and 88.68%, respectively. Results also show that the vote based classifier ensemble identified by the GA-based approach outperforms all the individual classifiers, three conventional baseline ensembles, and some other existing ensemble techniques. In a part of the article, we formulate the problem of feature selection in any classifier under the single objective optimization framework and show that our proposed classifier ensemble attains superior performance to it.
