Improving chemical named entity recognition in patents with contextualized word embeddings

Zenan Zhai, Dat Quoc Nguyen, Saber A. Akhondi, Camilo Thorne, Christian Druckenbrodt, Trevor Cohn, Michelle Gregory, Karin Verspoor

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

26 Scopus citations

Abstract

Chemical patents are an important resource for chemical information. However, few chemical Named Entity Recognition (NER) systems have been evaluated on patent documents, due in part to their structural and linguistic complexity. In this paper, we explore the NER performance of a BiLSTM-CRF model utilising pre-trained word embeddings, character-level word representations and contextualized ELMo word representations for chemical patents. We compare word embeddings pre-trained on biomedical and chemical patent corpora. The effect of tokenizers optimized for the chemical domain on NER performance in chemical patents is also explored. The results on two patent corpora show that contextualized word representations generated from ELMo substantially improve chemical NER performance w.r.t. the current state-of-the-art. We also show that domain-specific resources such as word embeddings trained on chemical patents and chemical-specific tokenizers have a positive impact on NER performance.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationBioNLP 2019 - SIGBioMed Workshop on Biomedical Natural Language Processing, Proceedings of the 18th BioNLP Workshop and Shared Task
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages328-338
Number of pages11
ISBN (Electronic)9781950737284
StatePublished - 2019
Externally publishedYes
Event18th SIGBioMed Workshop on Biomedical Natural Language Processing, BioNLP 2019 - Florence, Italy
Duration: Aug 1 2019 → …

Publication series

NameBioNLP 2019 - SIGBioMed Workshop on Biomedical Natural Language Processing, Proceedings of the 18th BioNLP Workshop and Shared Task

Conference

Conference18th SIGBioMed Workshop on Biomedical Natural Language Processing, BioNLP 2019
Country/TerritoryItaly
CityFlorence
Period08/1/19 → …

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