Papers › Robust Lexical Features for Improved Neural Network Named-Entity Recognition
Robust Lexical Features for Improved Neural Network Named-Entity Recognition
Abbas Ghaddar, Philippe Langlais
Neural network approaches to Named-Entity Recognition reduce the need for carefully hand-crafted features. While some features do remain in state-of-the-art systems, lexical features have been mostly discarded, with the exception of gazetteers. In this work, we show that this is unfair: lexical features are actually quite useful. We propose to embed words and entity types into a low-dimensional vector space we train from annotated data produced by distant supervision thanks to Wikipedia. From this, we compute - offline - a feature vector representing each word. When used with a vanilla recurrent neural network model, this representation yields substantial improvements. We establish a new state-of-the-art F1 score of 87.95 on ONTONOTES 5.0, while matching state-of-the-art performance with a F1 score of 91.73 on the over-studied CONLL-2003 dataset.
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Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Named Entity Recognition (NER) | CoNLL 2003 (English) | Bi-LSTM-CRF + Lexical Features | F1 | 91.73 | #55 of 73 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Named Entity Recognition (NER) | Ontonotes v5 (English) | Bi-LSTM-CRF + Lexical Features | F1 | 87.95 | #23 of 28 | 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.
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