Weakly Supervised Attention Networks for Entity Recognition

The task of entity recognition has traditionally been modelled as a sequence labelling task. However, this usually requires a large amount of fine-grained data annotated at the token level, which in turn can be expensive and cumbersome to obtain. In this work, we aim to circumvent this requirement of word-level annotated data. To achieve this, we propose a novel architecture for entity recognition from a corpus containing weak binary presence/absence labels, which are relatively easier to obtain. We show that our proposed weakly supervised model, trained solely on a multi-label classification task, performs reasonably well on the task of entity recognition, despite not having access to any token-level ground truth data.