Using Non-Local Features to Improve Named Entity Recognition Recall

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is always limited by its lower recall resulting from the asymmetric data distribution where the NONE class dominates the entity classes. This paper presents an approach that exploits non-local information to improve the NER recall. Several kinds of non-local features encoding entity token occurrence, entity boundary and entity class are explored under Conditional Random Fields (CRFs) framework. Experiments on SIGHAN 2006 MSRA (CityU) corpus indicate that non-local features can effectively enhance the recall of the state-of-the-art NER systems. Incorporating the non-local features into the NER systems using local features alone, our best system achieves a 23.56% (25.26%) relative error reduction on the recall and 17.10% (11.36%) relative error reduction on the F1 score; the improved F1 score 89.38% (90.09%) is significantly superior to the best NER system with F1 of 86.51% (89.03%) participated in the closed track.