Nested Named Entity Recognition via an Independent-Layered Pretrained Model

When an entity contains one or more entities, these particular entities are referred to as nested entities. The Layered BiLSTM-CRF model can use multiple BiLSTM layers to identify nested entities. However, as the number of layers increases, the number of labels that the model can learn decreases, and it may not even predict any entities, thereby causing the model to stop stacking. Furthermore, the model will be constrained by the one-way propagation of information from the lower layer to the higher layer. The incorrect entities extracted by the outer layer will affect the performance of the inner layer. We propose a novel neural network for nested named entity recognition (NER) that dynamically stacks flat NER layers to address these issues. Each flat NER layer captures contextual information based on a pretrained model with more robust feature extraction capabilities. The model parameters of a flat NER layer and its input are entirely independent. The input of each layer is all of the word representations generated by the input sequence through the embedding layer. The independent input ensures that different flat NER layers will not be interfered with by other flat NER layers during model training and testing to reduce error propagation. Experiments show that our model obtains F1 scores of 76.9%, 78.1%, and 78.0% on the ACE2004, ACE2005, and GENIA datasets, respectively.