Conference article

Named entity recognition (NER) is a well-researched task in the field of NLP, which typically requires large annotated corpora for training usable models. This is a problem for languages which lack large annotated corpora, such as Finnish. We propose an approach to create a named entity recognizer with no annotated or parallel documents, by leveraging strong NER models that exist for English. We automatically gather a large amount of {\em chronologically matched} data in two languages, then project named entity annotations from the English documents onto the Finnish ones, by resolving the matches with limited linguistic rules. We use this ``artificially’’ annotated data to train a BiLSTM-CRF model. Our results show that this method can produce annotated instances with high precision, and the resulting model achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Automatic data annotation Named Entity Recognition Neural Network