Context-Aware Bidirectional Neural Model for Sindhi Named Entity Recognition

Named entity recognition (NER) is a fundamental task in many natural language processing (NLP) applications, such as text summarization and semantic information retrieval. Recently, deep neural networks (NNs) with the attention mechanism yield excellent performance in NER by taking advantage of character-level and word-level representation learning. In this paper, we propose a deep context-aware bidirectional long short-term memory (CaBiLSTM) model for the Sindhi NER task. The model relies upon contextual representation learning (CRL), bidirectional encoder, self-attention, and sequential conditional random field (CRF). The CaBiLSTM model incorporates task-oriented CRL based on joint character-level and word-level representations. It takes character-level input to learn the character representations. Afterwards, the character representations are transformed into word features, and the bidirectional encoder learns the word representations. The output of the final encoder is fed into the self-attention through a hidden layer before decoding. Finally, we employ the CRF for the prediction of label sequences. The baselines and the proposed CaBiLSTM model are compared by exploiting pretrained Sindhi GloVe (SdGloVe), Sindhi fastText (SdfastText), task-oriented, and CRL-based word representations on the recently proposed SiNER dataset. Our proposed CaBiLSTM model achieved a high F1-score of 91.25% on the SiNER dataset with CRL without relying on additional handmade features, such as hand-crafted rules, gazetteers, or dictionaries.