Fine-grained Entity Recognition (FgER) is the task of detecting and classifying entity mentions to a large set of types spanning diverse domains such as biomedical, finance and sports. We observe that when the type set spans several domains, detection of entity mention becomes a limitation for supervised learning models. The primary reason being lack of dataset where entity boundaries are properly annotated while covering a large spectrum of entity types. Our work directly addresses this issue. We propose Heuristics Allied with Distant Supervision (HAnDS) framework to automatically construct a quality dataset suitable for the FgER task. HAnDS framework exploits the high interlink among Wikipedia and Freebase in a pipelined manner, reducing annotation errors introduced by naively using distant supervision approach. Using HAnDS framework, we create two datasets, one suitable for building FgER systems recognizing up to 118 entity types based on the FIGER type hierarchy and another for up to 1115 entity types based on the TypeNet hierarchy. Our extensive empirical experimentation warrants the quality of the generated datasets. Along with this, we also provide a manually annotated dataset for benchmarking FgER systems.
Named entity recognition (ner) for English typically involves one of three gold standards: muc, conll, or bbn, all created by costly manual annotation. Recent work has used Wikipedia to automatically create a massive corpus of named entity annotated text. We present the first comprehensive cross-corpus evaluation of ner. We identify the causes of poor cross-corpus performance and demonstrate ways of making them more compatible. Using our process, we develop a Wikipedia corpus which outperforms gold standard corpora on cross-corpus evaluation by up to 11 . We automatically create enormous, free and multilingual silver-standard training annotations for named entity recognition (ner) by exploiting the text and structure of Wikipedia. Most ner systems rely on statistical models of annotated data to identify and classify names of people, locations and organisations in text. This dependence on expensive annotation is the knowledge bottleneck our work overcomes. We first classify each Wikipedia article into named entity (ne) types, training and evaluating on 7200 manually-labelled Wikipedia articles across nine languages. Our cross-lingual approach achieves up to 95 accuracy. We transform the links between articles into ne annotations by projecting the target [email protected]?s classifications onto the anchor text. This approach yields reasonable annotations, but does not immediately compete with existing gold-standard data. By inferring additional links and heuristically tweaking the Wikipedia corpora, we better align our automatic annotations to gold standards. We annotate millions of words in nine languages, evaluating English, German, Spanish, Dutch and Russian Wikipedia-trained models against conll shared task data and other gold-standard corpora. Our approach outperforms other approaches to automatic ne annotation (Richman and Schone, 2008 [61], , 2008 [46]) competes with gold-standard training when tested on an evaluation corpus from a different source; and performs 10 better than newswire-trained models on manually-annotated Wikipedia text. Statistical named entity recognisers require costly hand-labelled training data and, as a result, most existing corpora are small. We exploit Wikipedia to create a massive corpus of named entity annotated text. We transform Wikipedia’s links into named entity annotations by classifying the target articles into common entity types (e.g. person, organisation and location). Comparing to MUC, CONLL and BBN corpora, Wikipedia generally performs better than other cross-corpus train test pairs.