Person-specific named entity recognition using SVM with rich feature sets

Purpose: The purpose of the study is to explore the potential use of nature language process (NLP) and machine learning (ML) techniques and intents to find a feasible strategy and effective approach to fulfill the NER task for Web oriented person-specific information extraction. Design/methodology/approach: An SVM-based multi-classification approach combined with a set of rich NLP features derived from state-of-the-art NLP techniques has been proposed to fulfill the NER task. A group of experiments has been designed to investigate the influence of various NLP-based features to the performance of the system, especially the semantic features. Optimal parameter settings regarding with SVM models, including kernel functions, margin parameter of SVM model and the context window size, have been explored through experiments as well. Findings: The SVM-based multi-classification approach has been proved to be effective for the NER task. This work shows that NLP-based features are of great importance in datadriven NE recognition, particularly the semantic features. The study indicates that higher order kernel function may not be desirable for the specific classification problem in practical application. The simple linear-kernel SVM model performed better in this case. Moreover, the modified SVM models with uneven margin parameter are more common and flexible, which have been proved to solve the imbalanced data problem better. Research limitations/implications: The SVM-based approach for NER problem is only proved to be effective on limited experiment data. Further research need to be conducted on the large batch of real Web data. In addition, the performance of the NER system need be tested when incorporated into a complete IE framework. Originality/value: The specially designed experiments make it feasible to fully explore the characters of the data and obtain the optimal parameter settings for the NER task, leading to a preferable rate in recall, precision and F 1 measures. The overall system performance ( F 1 value) for all types of name entities can achieve above 88.6%, which can meet the requirements for the practical application.