Structured named entity recognition by cascading CRFs

Abstract

NER is an important task in NLP, often used as a basis for further treatments. A new challenge has emerged in the last few years: structured named entity recognition, where not only named entities must be identified but also their hierarchical components. In this article, we describe a cascading CRFs approach to address this challenge. It reaches the state of the art while remaining very simple on a structured NER challenge. We then offer an error analysis of our system based on a detailed, yet simple, error classification.