POLYGLOT-NER: Massive Multilingual Named Entity Recognition

TL;DR

This paper presents a scalable, minimal-resource approach to building multilingual Named Entity Recognition systems for 40 languages using Wikipedia and Freebase, without relying on language-specific annotated data.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel language-agnostic method for constructing NER annotators for numerous languages without requiring traditional annotated datasets or linguistic resources.

Findings

Achieved competitive NER performance across 40 languages.

Developed a distant evaluation method for low-resource languages.

Demonstrated minimal human intervention in system construction.

Abstract

The increasing diversity of languages used on the web introduces a new level of complexity to Information Retrieval (IR) systems. We can no longer assume that textual content is written in one language or even the same language family. In this paper, we demonstrate how to build massive multilingual annotators with minimal human expertise and intervention. We describe a system that builds Named Entity Recognition (NER) annotators for 40 major languages using Wikipedia and Freebase. Our approach does not require NER human annotated datasets or language specific resources like treebanks, parallel corpora, and orthographic rules. The novelty of approach lies therein - using only language agnostic techniques, while achieving competitive performance. Our method learns distributed word representations (word embeddings) which encode semantic and syntactic features of words in each language. Then, we automatically generate datasets from Wikipedia link structure and Freebase attributes. Finally, we apply two preprocessing stages (oversampling and exact surface form matching) which do not require any linguistic expertise. Our evaluation is two fold: First, we demonstrate the system performance on human annotated datasets. Second, for languages where no gold-standard benchmarks are available, we propose a new method, distant evaluation, based on statistical machine translation.