Skip to main content

Deep Learning Approach for Arabic Named Entity Recognition

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing (CICLing 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 9623))

Abstract

Inspired by recent work in Deep Learning that have achieved excellent performance on difficult problems such as computer vision and speech recognition, we introduce a simple and fast model for Arabic named entity recognition based on Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). Named Entity Recognition (NER) is the task of classifying or labelling atomic elements in the text into categories such as Person, Location or Organization. The unique characteristics and the complexity of the Arabic language make the extraction of named entities a challenging task. Most state-of-the-art systems use a combination of various Machine Learning algorithms or rely on handcrafted engineering features and the output of other NLP tasks such as part-of-speech (POS) tagging, text chunking, prefixes and suffixes as well as a large gazetteer. In this paper, we present an Arabic NER system based on DNNs that automatically learns features from data. The experimental results show that our approach outperforms the model based on Conditional Random Fields by 12.36 points in F-measure. Moreover, our model outperforms the state-of-the-art by 5.18 points in Precision and gets very close results in F-measure. Most importantly, our system can be easily extended to recognize other named entities without any additional rules or handcrafted engineering features.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    The code will be released right after the paper will be accepted.

References

  • Abdallah, S., Shaalan, K., Shoaib, M.: Integrating rule-based system with classification for arabic named entity recognition. In: Gelbukh, A. (ed.) CICLing 2012. LNCS, vol. 7181, pp. 311–322. Springer, Heidelberg (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-28604-9_26

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Rahman, S.A., Elarnaoty, M., Magdy, M., Fahmy, A.: Integrated machine learning techniques for Arabic named entity recognition. Int. J. Comput. Sci. Issues (IJCSI) 7, 27–36 (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  • Babych, B., Hartley, A.: Improving machine translation quality with automatic named entity recognition. In: Proceedings of EACL-EAMT, Budapest (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  • Benajiba, Y., Rosso, P.: Anersys 2.0: conquering the NER task for the Arabic language by combining the maximum entropy with POS-tag information. In: IICAI, pp. 1814–1823 (2007a)

    Google Scholar 

  • Benajiba, Y., Rosso, P., BenedíRuiz, J.M.: ANERsys: an arabic named entity recognition system based on maximum entropy. In: Gelbukh, A. (ed.) CICLing 2007. LNCS, vol. 4394, pp. 143–153. Springer, Heidelberg (2007b). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-70939-8_13

  • Benajiba, Y., Rosso, P.: Arabic named entity recognition using conditional random fields. In: Workshop on HLT & NLP within the Arabic World. Arabic Language and Local Languages Processing: Status Updates and Prospects (2008a)

    Google Scholar 

  • Benajiba, Y., Diab, M., Rosso, P.: Arabic named entity recognition: an SVM-based approach. In: Proceedings of Arab International Conference on Information Technology (ACIT 2008), pp. 16–18 (2008b)

    Google Scholar 

  • Bengio, Y., Ducharme, R., Vincent, P., Janvin, C.: A neural probabilistic language model. J. Mach. Learn. Res. 3, 1137–1155 (2003)

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Bengio, Y.: Learning deep architectures for AI. Found. Trends Mach. Learn. 2(1), 1–127 (2009)

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Chinchor, N., Brown, E., Ferro, L., Robinson, P.: Named entity recognition task definition. In: MITRE and SAIC (1999)

    Google Scholar 

  • Cho, K., van Merrienboer, B., Gulcehre, C., Bougares, F., Schwenk, H., Bengio, Y.: Learning phrase representations using RNN encoder-decoder for statistical machine translation. In: EMNLP, October 2014

    Google Scholar 

  • Ciresan, D., Meier, U., Schmidhuber, J.: Multi-column deep neural networks for image classification. In: CVPR (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  • Collobert, R., Weston, J.: A unified architecture for natural language processing: deep neural networks with multitask learning. In: Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Machine Learning, pp. 160–167. ACM (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  • Collobert, R., Weston, J., Bottou, L., Karlen, M., Kavukcuoglu, K., Kuksa, P.: Natural language processing (almost) from scratch. J. Mach. Learn. Res. 12, 2493–2537 (2011)

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Dahl, G.E., Yu, D., Deng, L., Acero, A.: Context-dependent pre-trained deep neural networks for large vocabulary speech recognition. IEEE Trans. Audio Speech Lang. Process. 20(1), 30–42 (2012). Special Issue on Deep Learning for Speech and Language Processing

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Deng, L., Li, J., Huang, J.-T., Yao, K., Yu, D., Seide, F., Seltzer, M., Zweig, G., He, X., Williams, X., Gong, Y., Acero, A.: Recent advances in deep learning for speech research at Microsoft. In: Proceedings of International Conference on Acoustics Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  • dos Santos, C., Gatti, M.: Deep convolutional neural networks for sentiment analysis of short texts. In: Proceedings of COLING 2014, the 25th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Technical Papers, pp. 69–78. Dublin City University and Association for Computational Linguistics, Dublin, Ireland, August 2014

    Google Scholar 

  • Elsebai, A., Meziane, F., Belkredim, F.Z.: A rule based persons names Arabic extraction system. Commun. IBIMA 11(6), 53–59 (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  • Finkel, J.R., Kleeman, A., Manning, C.D.: Efficient, feature-based, conditional random field parsing. In: Proceedings of ACL (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  • Greenwood, M., Gaizauskas, R.: Using a named entity tagger to generalise surface matching text patterns for question answering. In: Proceedings of the Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Question Answering (EACL03) (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  • Hinton, G., Osindero, S., Teh, Y.-W.: A fast learning algorithm for deep belief nets. Neural Comput. 18, 1527–1554 (2006)

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Hinton, G., Deng, G., Yu, D., Dahl, G., Mohamed, A., Jaitly, N., Senior, A., Vanhoucke, V., Nguyen, P., Sainath, T., Kingsbury, B.: Deep neural networks for acoustic modeling in speech recognition. IEEE Signal Process. Mag. 29(6), 82–97 (2012)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hinton, G.: Neural networks for machine learning. Coursera, video lectures (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  • Huang, E.H., Socher, R., Manning, C.D., Ng, A.Y.: Improving word representations via global context and multiple word prototypes. In: Proceedings of ACL (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  • Krizhevsky, A., Sutskever, I., Hinton, G.E.: ImageNet classification with deep convolutional neural networks. In: NIPS (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  • Le, Q.V., Ranzato, M.A., Monga, R., Devin, M., Chen, K., Corrado, G.S., Dean, J., Ng, A.Y.: Building high-level features using large scale unsupervised learning. In: ICML (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  • LeCun, Y., Bottou, L., Bengio, Y., Haffner, P.: Gradient based learning applied to document recognition. Proc. IEEE 86(11), 2278–2324 (1998)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mikolov, T., Kombrink, S., Burget, L., ÄŒernocký, J., Khudanpur, S.: Extensions of recurrent neural network language model. In: Proceedings of ICASSP (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  • Mikolov, T., Sutskever, I., Chen, K., Corrado, G., Dean, J.: Distributed representations of words and phrases and their compositionality. In: NIPS, pp. 3111–3119 (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  • Pennington, J., Socher, R., Manning, C.: GloVe: global vectors for word representation. In: Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), October 2014, pp. 1532–1543 (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  • Rumelhart, D.E., Hinton, G.E., Williams, R.J.: Learning internal representations by error propagation. In: Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Processing (1986)

    Google Scholar 

  • Shaalan, K., Raza, H.: NERA: named entity recognition for Arabic. J. Am. Soc. Inform. Sci. Technol. 60(8), 1652–1663 (2009)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Shaalan, K., Oudah, M.: A hybrid approach to Arabic named entity recognition. J. Inf. Sci. 40(1), 67–87 (2014)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Socher, R., Huang, E.H., Pennington, J., Ng, A.Y., Manning, C.D.: Dynamic pooling and unfolding recursive autoencoders for paraphrase detection. In: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 24 (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  • Socher, R., Perelygin, A., Wu, J.Y., Chuang, J., Manning, C.D., Ng, A.Y., Potts, C.: Recursive deep models for semantic compositionality over a sentiment treebank. In: Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  • Sutskever, I., Vinyals, O., Le, Q.V.: Sequence to sequence learning with neural networks. In: NIPS (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  • Täckström, O., McDonald, R., Uszkoreit, J.: Cross-lingual word clusters for direct transfer of linguistic structure. In: Proceedings of NAACL (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  • Toda, H., Kataoka, R.: A search result clustering method using informatively named entities. In: Proceedings of the 7th Annual ACM International Workshop on Web Information and Data Management (WIDM), pp. 81–86. ACM Press (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  • Turian, J., Ratinov, L.-A., Bengio, Y.: Word representations: a simple and general method for semi-supervised learning. In: Proceedings of ACL (2010)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Mourad Gridach .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2018 Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature

About this paper

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

Gridach, M. (2018). Deep Learning Approach for Arabic Named Entity Recognition. In: Gelbukh, A. (eds) Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing. CICLing 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9623. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75477-2_31

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75477-2_31

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-75476-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-75477-2

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics