Data-Augmented Hybrid Named Entity Recognition for Disaster Management by Transfer Learning

• Main Authors: Hung-Kai Kung, Chun-Mo Hsieh, Cheng-Yu Ho, Yun-Cheng Tsai, Hao-Yung Chan, Meng-Han Tsai
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2020-06-01
• Series: Applied Sciences
• Subjects: damage information gathering; disaster management; data augmentation; transfer learning; named entity recognition; chatbot
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/10/12/4234

This research aims to build a Mandarin named entity recognition (NER) module using transfer learning to facilitate damage information gathering and analysis in disaster management. The hybrid NER approach proposed in this research includes three modules: (1) data augmentation, which constructs a concise data set for disaster management; (2) reference model, which utilizes the bidirectional long short-term memory–conditional random field framework to implement NER; and (3) the augmented model built by integrating the first two modules via cross-domain transfer with disparate label sets. Through the combination of established rules and learned sentence patterns, the hybrid approach performs well in NER tasks for disaster management and recognizes unfamiliar words successfully. This research applied the proposed NER module to disaster management. In the application, we favorably handled the NER tasks of our related work and achieved our desired outcomes. Through proper transfer, the results of this work can be extended to other fields and consequently bring valuable advantages in diverse applications.