Chinese-clinical-record Named Entity Recognition using IDCNN-BiLSTM-Highway Network

Chinese named entity recognition (NER) is a challenging work that seeks to find, recognize and classify various types of information elements in unstructured text. Due to the Chinese text has no natural boundary like the spaces in the English text, Chinese named entity identification is much more difficult. At present, most deep learning based NER models are developed using a bidirectional long short-term memory network (BiLSTM), yet the performance still has some space to improve. To further improve their performance in Chinese NER tasks, we propose a new NER model, IDCNN-BiLSTM-Highway, which is a combination of the BiLSTM, the iterated dilated convolutional neural network (IDCNN) and the highway network. In our model, IDCNN is used to achieve multiscale context aggregation from a long sequence of words. Highway network is used to effectively connect different layers of networks, allowing information to pass through network layers smoothly without attenuation. Finally, the global optimum tag result is obtained by introducing conditional random field (CRF). The experimental results show that compared with other popular deep learning-based NER models, our model shows superior performance on two Chinese NER data sets: Resume and Yidu-S4k, The F1-scores are 94.98 and 77.59, respectively.