A hybrid approach to NER by MEMM and manual rules

This paper describes a framework for defining domain specific Feature Functions in a user friendly form to be used in a Maximum Entropy Markov Model (MEMM) for the Named Entity Recognition (NER) task. Our system called MERGE allows defining general Feature Function Templates, as well as Linguistic Rules incorporated into the classifier. The simple way of translating these rules into specific feature functions are shown. We show that MERGE can perform better from both purely machine learning based systems and purely-knowledge based approaches by some small expert interaction of rule-tuning.