The task of named entity recognition (NER) is normally divided into nested NER and flat NER depending on whether named entities are nested or not. Models are usually separately developed for the two tasks, since sequence labeling models are only able to assign a single label to a particular token, which is unsuitable for nested NER where a token may be assigned several labels.

Many NLP tasks such as tagging and machine reading comprehension (MRC) are faced with the severe data imbalance issue: negative examples significantly outnumber positive ones, and the huge number of easy-negative examples overwhelms training. The most commonly used cross entropy criteria is actually accuracy-oriented, which creates a discrepancy between training and test. At training time, each training instance contributes equally to the objective function, while at test time F1 score concerns more about positive examples.

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The task of named entity recognition (NER) is normally divided into nested NER and flat NER depending on whether named entities are nested or not. Models are usually separately developed for the two tasks, since sequence labeling models, the most widely used backbone for flat NER, are only able to assign a single label to a particular token, which is unsuitable for nested NER where a token may be assigned several labels. 1 This paper includes material from the unpublished manuscript "Query-Based Named Entity Recognition".2 Xiaoya and Jingrong contribute equally to this paper. 3 Code is coming soon.

Segmenting a chunk of text into words is usually the first step of processing Chinese text, but its necessity has rarely been explored. In this paper, we ask the fundamental question of whether Chinese word segmentation (CWS) is necessary for deep learning-based Chinese Natural Language Processing. We benchmark neural word-based models which rely on word segmentation against neural char-based models which do not involve word segmentation in four end-to-end NLP benchmark tasks: language modeling, machine translation, sentence matching/paraphrase and text classification. Through direct comparisons between these two types of models, we find that charbased models consistently outperform wordbased models. Based on these observations, we conduct comprehensive experiments to study why wordbased models underperform char-based models in these deep learning-based NLP tasks. We show that it is because word-based models are more vulnerable to data sparsity and the presence of out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words, and thus more prone to overfitting. We hope this paper could encourage researchers in the community to rethink the necessity of word segmentation in deep learning-based Chinese Natural Language Processing. 1

In this work, we propose BertGCN, a model that combines large scale pretraining and transductive learning for text classification. Bert-GCN constructs a heterogeneous graph over the dataset and represents documents as nodes using BERT representations. By jointly training the BERT and GCN modules within Bert-GCN, the proposed model is able to leverage the advantages of both worlds: large-scale pretraining which takes the advantage of the massive amount of raw data and transductive learning which jointly learns representations for both training data and unlabeled test data by propagating label influence through graph convolution. Experiments show that BertGCN achieves SOTA performances on a wide range of text classification datasets. 1

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Recent pretraining models in Chinese neglect two important aspects specific to the Chinese language: glyph and pinyin, which carry significant syntax and semantic information for language understanding. In this work, we propose ChineseBERT, which incorporates both the glyph and pinyin information of Chinese characters into language model pretraining. The glyph embedding is obtained based on different fonts of a Chinese character, being able to capture character semantics from the visual features, and the pinyin embedding characterizes the pronunciation of Chinese characters, which handles the highly prevalent heteronym phenomenon in Chinese (the same character has different pronunciations with different meanings). Pretrained on large-scale unlabeled Chinese corpus, the proposed Chine-seBERT model yields significant performance boost over baseline models with fewer training steps. The proposed model achieves new SOTA performances on a wide range of Chinese NLP tasks，including machine reading comprehension, natural language inference, text classification, sentence pair matching, and competitive performances in named entity recognition and word segmentation. 1