Token relation aware Chinese named entity recognition

Due to the lack of natural delimiters, most Chinese Named Entity Recognition (NER) approaches are character-based and utilize an external lexicon to leverage the word-level information. Although they have achieved promising results, the latent words they introduced are still non-contextualized. In this paper, we investigate three relations, i.e, adjacent relation between characters, character co-occurrence relation between latent words, and dependency relation among tokens, to address this issue. Specifically, we first establish the local context for latent words and then propose a masked self-attention mechanism to incorporate such local contextual information. Besides, since introducing external knowledge such as lexicon and dependency relation inevitably brings in some noises, we propose a gated information controller to handle this problem. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed approach surpasses most similar methods on public datasets and demonstrates its promising potential.