Combining rule-based and statistical mechanisms for low-resource named entity recognition

Ryan Gabbard, Jay DeYoung, Constantine Lignos, Marjorie Freedman, Ralph M. Weischedel

Abstract: We describe a multifaceted approach to named entity recognition that can be deployed with minimal data resources and a handful of hours of non-expert annotation. We describe how this approach was applied in the 2016 LoReHLT evaluation and demonstrate that both statistical and rule-based approaches contribute to our performance. We also demonstrate across many languages the value of selecting the sentences to be annotated when training on small amounts of data.