Papers › CAN-NER: Convolutional Attention Network for Chinese Named Entity Recognition

CAN-NER: Convolutional Attention Network for Chinese Named Entity Recognition

3 Apr 2019NAACL 2019 6arXiv:1904.02141archive 2025-07-28

Yuying Zhu, Guoxin Wang, Börje F. Karlsson

Named entity recognition (NER) in Chinese is essential but difficult because of the lack of natural delimiters. Therefore, Chinese Word Segmentation (CWS) is usually considered as the first step for Chinese NER. However, models based on word-level embeddings and lexicon features often suffer from segmentation errors and out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words. In this paper, we investigate a Convolutional Attention Network called CAN for Chinese NER, which consists of a character-based convolutional neural network (CNN) with local-attention layer and a gated recurrent unit (GRU) with global self-attention layer to capture the information from adjacent characters and sentence contexts. Also, compared to other models, not depending on any external resources like lexicons and employing small size of char embeddings make our model more practical. Extensive experimental results show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods without word embedding and external lexicon resources on different domain datasets including Weibo, MSRA and Chinese Resume NER dataset.

PaperPDFConference PDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

microsoft/vert-papers officialpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Chinese Named Entity RecognitionNERNamed Entity RecognitionNamed Entity Recognition (NER)SegmentationSentencenamed-entity-recognition

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Chinese Named Entity Recognition MSRA CAN-NER Model F1 92.97 #20 of 21 Archive leaderboard report
Chinese Named Entity Recognition MSRA CAN-NER Model Precision 93.53 #20 of 21 Archive leaderboard report
Chinese Named Entity Recognition MSRA CAN-NER Model Recall 92.42 #20 of 21 Archive leaderboard report
Chinese Named Entity Recognition OntoNotes 4 CAN-NER Model F1 73.64 #15 of 15 Archive leaderboard report
Chinese Named Entity Recognition OntoNotes 4 CAN-NER Model Precision 75.05 #15 of 15 Archive leaderboard report
Chinese Named Entity Recognition OntoNotes 4 CAN-NER Model Recall 72.29 #15 of 15 Archive leaderboard report
Chinese Named Entity Recognition Resume NER CAN-NER Model F1 94.94 #12 of 13 Archive leaderboard report
Chinese Named Entity Recognition Resume NER CAN-NER Model Precision 95.05 #12 of 13 Archive leaderboard report
Chinese Named Entity Recognition Resume NER CAN-NER Model Recall 94.82 #12 of 13 Archive leaderboard report
Chinese Named Entity Recognition Weibo NER CAN-NER Model Accuracy-NE 55.38 #18 of 18 Archive leaderboard report
Chinese Named Entity Recognition Weibo NER CAN-NER Model Accuracy-NM 62.98 #18 of 18 Archive leaderboard report
Chinese Named Entity Recognition Weibo NER CAN-NER Model Overall 59.31 #18 of 18 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections