Multi-Grained Entity Proposal Network for Named Entity Recognition

In this paper, we focus on a new Named Entity Recognition (NER) task, ie, the Multi-grained NER task. This task aims to simultaneously detect both fine-grained and coarse-grained entities in sentences. Correspondingly, we develop a novel Multi-grained Entity Proposal Network (MGEPN). Different from traditional NER models which regard NER as a sequential labeling task, MGEPN provides a new method that proposes entity candidates in the Proposal Network and classifies entities into different categories in the Classification Network. All possible entity candidates including fine-grained ones and coarse-grained ones are proposed in the Proposal Network, which enables the MGEPN model to identify multi-grained entities. In order to better identify named entities and determine their categories, context information is utilized and transferred from the Proposal Network to the Classification Network during the learning process. A novel Entity-Context attention mechanism is also introduced to help the model focus on entity-related context information. Experiments show that our model can obtain state-of-the-art performance on two real-world datasets for both the Multi-grained NER task and the traditional NER task.