Semantic-enhanced graph neural network for named entity recognition in ancient Chinese books

Abstract

Named entity recognition (NER) plays a crucial role in the extraction and utilization of knowledge of ancient Chinese books. However, the challenges of ancient Chinese NER not only originate from linguistic features such as the use of single characters and short sentences but are also exacerbated by the scarcity of training data. These factors together limit the capability of deep learning models, like BERT-CRF, in capturing the semantic representation of ancient Chinese characters. In this paper, we explore the semantic enhancement of NER in ancient Chinese books through the utilization of external knowledge. We propose a novel model based on Graph Neural Networks that integrates two different forms of external knowledge: dictionary-level and chapter-level information. Through the Graph Attention Mechanism (GAT), these external knowledge are effectively incorporated into the model’s input context. Our model is evaluated on the C_CLUE dataset, showing an improvement of 3.82% over the baseline BAC-CRF model. It also achieves the best score compared to several state-of-the-art dictionary-augmented models.