ANEA: Automated (Named) Entity Annotation for German Domain-Specific Texts

TL;DR

ANEA is an automated tool designed to assist in creating domain-specific named entity recognition corpora for German texts by automatically identifying and labeling relevant entities, thereby supporting specialized NER tasks.

Contribution

The paper introduces ANEA, a novel automated annotation system that helps generate domain-specific NER datasets for German texts, addressing limitations of general NER categories.

Findings

ANEA effectively identifies key domain-specific terms.

It groups coherent terms and assigns descriptive labels.

The tool facilitates the creation of domain-specific NER corpora.

Abstract

Named entity recognition (NER) is an important task that aims to resolve universal categories of named entities, e.g., persons, locations, organizations, and times. Despite its common and viable use in many use cases, NER is barely applicable in domains where general categories are suboptimal, such as engineering or medicine. To facilitate NER of domain-specific types, we propose ANEA, an automated (named) entity annotator to assist human annotators in creating domain-specific NER corpora for German text collections when given a set of domain-specific texts. In our evaluation, we find that ANEA automatically identifies terms that best represent the texts' content, identifies groups of coherent terms, and extracts and assigns descriptive labels to these groups, i.e., annotates text datasets into the domain (named) entities.