DMNER: Biomedical Named Entity Recognition by Detection and Matching

Biomedical Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a crucial task in extracting information from biomedical texts. However, the diversity of professional terminology, semantic complexity, and the widespread presence of synonyms pose significant challenges. Traditional methods that rely on sequence labeling training datasets often struggle to handle these complexities. To address this, we introduce a novel framework for BioNER, termed DMNER, which leverages external knowledge and operates in two steps: entity boundary detection and entity category identification through matching. The core of DMNER is its second step, which determines the entity category by retrieving similar entities and their categories from a knowledge dictionary using semantic similarity matching. Our experiments on 10 biomedical datasets demonstrate that DMNER outperforms baselines across these tasks, proving its effectiveness and adaptability. DMNER is versatile and can be applied to various NER tasks, including supervised NER, distantly supervised NER, and NER on multiple datasets with disjoint label sets. The DMNER code is publicly available ¹.