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Product named entity recognition in Chinese text

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Abstract

There are many expressive and structural differences between product names and general named entities such as person names, location names and organization names. To date, there has been little research on product named entity recognition (NER), which is crucial and valuable for information extraction in the field of market intelligence. This paper focuses on product NER (PRO NER) in Chinese text. First, we describe our efforts on data annotation, including well-defined specifications, data analysis and development of a corpus with annotated product named entities. Second, a hierarchical hidden Markov model-based approach to PRO NER is proposed and evaluated. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method outperforms the cascaded maximum entropy model and obtains promising results on the data sets of two different electronic product domains (digital and cell phone).

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Notes

  1. For purposes of clarity and precision, the singular forms “product named entity” and “named entity” are abbreviated “PRO NE” and “NE”, respectively, while the plural forms “product named entities” and “named entities” are abbreviated “PRO NEs” and “NEs,” respectively.

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Acknowledgments

This work is supported by the National High Technology Development 863 Program of China under Grant No. 2006AA01Z144, the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 60673042, and the Natural Science Foundation of Beijing under Grants No. 4052027 and 4073043. This research is also carried out as part of a cooperative project with Fujitsu R&D Center Co., Ltd. We would like to thank Dr. Hao YU, Dr. Yingju XIA, and Dr. Fumihito Nishino for helpful conversations and feedback on the corpus. We would like to thank Dr. Yang LIU of the University of Texas at Dallas, Dr. Ying ZHAO of Tsinghua University, and Mr. Matthew Trueman for their useful suggestions for modifying earlier drafts of the paper. We are grateful to the anonymous reviewers for very helpful comments on an earlier draft. Their insights and suggestions have led to many improvements in the paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100080, China

    Jun Zhao & Feifan Liu

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  1. Jun Zhao
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  2. Feifan Liu
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Correspondence to Jun Zhao.

Additional information

This research was conducted under the framework of the Chinese Linguistic Data Consortium (ChineseLDC). In the first phase, ChineseLDC created a series of fundamental Chinese language resources, including Comprehensive Chinese Lexicon, Chinese Grammatical Knowledge Base (frequent words), Word-segmented and POS-tagged Chinese Corpus, Syntactic Treebank, Chinese–English Parallel Corpus, Chinese Semantic Lexicon, etc. Construction of the Product Named Entity Tagged Corpus and development of the Automatic Product Named Entity Recognition Tool are among the tasks of the second phase of ChineseLDC.

Appendix: Peking University’s TagSet for POS Tagging Chinese Texts (Yu et al. 2003)

Appendix: Peking University’s TagSet for POS Tagging Chinese Texts (Yu et al. 2003)

   
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Zhao, J., Liu, F. Product named entity recognition in Chinese text. Lang Resources & Evaluation 42, 197–217 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-008-9066-8

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