Multichannel LSTM-CRF for Named Entity Recognition in Chinese Social Media

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a tough task in Chinese social media due to a large portion of informal writings. Existing research uses only limited in-domain annotated data and achieves low performance. In this paper, we utilize both limited in-domain data and enough out-of-domain data using a domain adaptation method. We propose a multichannel LSTM-CRF model that employs different channels to capture general patterns, in-domain patterns and out-of-domain patterns in Chinese social media. The extensive experiments show that our model yields 9.8% improvement over previous state-of-the-art methods. We further find that a shared embedding layer is important and randomly initialized embeddings are better than the pretrained ones.