Knowledge-Grounded and Self-extending NER

Abstract

The wave of digitization has begun. Organizations deal with huge amounts of data, such as logs, websites, and documents. A common way to make the information contained in these sources machine-accessible for automated processing is to first extract the information and then store it in a knowledge graph. A key task in this approach is to recognize entities. While common named entity recognition (NER) models work well for common entity types, they typically fail to recognize custom entities. Custom entity recognition requires data to be manually annotated and custom NER models to be trained. To efficiently extract the information, this paper proposes an innovative solution: Our Gazetteer approach uses a knowledge graph to create a coarse and fast NER component, reducing the need for manual annotation and saving human effort. Focusing on a university use case, our Gazetteer is integrated into a chatbot for entity recognition. In addition, data can be annotated using the Gazetteer and an NER model can be trained. Subsequently, the NER model can be used to recognize unseen custom entities, which are then added to the knowledge graph. This will improve the knowledge graph and make it self-extending.