Papers › FLAT: Chinese NER Using Flat-Lattice Transformer

FLAT: Chinese NER Using Flat-Lattice Transformer

24 Apr 2020ACL 2020 6arXiv:2004.11795archive 2025-07-28

Xiaonan Li, Hang Yan, Xipeng Qiu, Xuanjing Huang

Recently, the character-word lattice structure has been proved to be effective for Chinese named entity recognition (NER) by incorporating the word information. However, since the lattice structure is complex and dynamic, most existing lattice-based models are hard to fully utilize the parallel computation of GPUs and usually have a low inference-speed. In this paper, we propose FLAT: Flat-LAttice Transformer for Chinese NER, which converts the lattice structure into a flat structure consisting of spans. Each span corresponds to a character or latent word and its position in the original lattice. With the power of Transformer and well-designed position encoding, FLAT can fully leverage the lattice information and has an excellent parallelization ability. Experiments on four datasets show FLAT outperforms other lexicon-based models in performance and efficiency.

PaperPDFConference PDFCode

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

Code

LeeSureman/Flat-Lattice-Transformer officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch 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)named-entity-recognition

1 archive task tag without a task page not shown.

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Chinese Named Entity Recognition MSRA FLAT+BERT F1 96.09 #5 of 21 Archive leaderboard report
Chinese Named Entity Recognition MSRA FLAT F1 94.12 #13 of 21 Archive leaderboard report
Chinese Named Entity Recognition OntoNotes 4 FLAT+BERT F1 81.82 #6 of 15 Archive leaderboard report
Chinese Named Entity Recognition OntoNotes 4 FLAT F1 76.45 #11 of 15 Archive leaderboard report
Chinese Named Entity Recognition Resume NER FLAT+BERT F1 95.86 #6 of 13 Archive leaderboard report
Chinese Named Entity Recognition Resume NER FLAT F1 95.45 #10 of 13 Archive leaderboard report
Chinese Named Entity Recognition Weibo NER FLAT+BERT F1 68.55 #8 of 18 Archive leaderboard report
Chinese Named Entity Recognition Weibo NER FLAT F1 60.32 #14 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.

Methods

Absolute Position EncodingsAdamAttentionBPEDense ConnectionsDropoutLabel SmoothingLayer NormalizationLinear LayerMulti-Head AttentionPosition-Wise Feed-Forward LayerReLUResidual ConnectionSoftmaxTransformer

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