Attention-based interactive multi-level feature fusion for named entity recognition

Abstract Named Entity Recognition (NER) is an essential component of numerous Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems, with the aim of identifying and classifying entities that have specific meanings in raw text, such as person (PER), location (LOC), and organization (ORG). Recently, Deep Neural N...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Yiwu Xu, Yun Chen
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Nature Portfolio 2025-01-01
Series:Scientific Reports
Subjects:
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-86718-0
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1832585774146519040
author Yiwu Xu
Yun Chen
author_facet Yiwu Xu
Yun Chen
author_sort Yiwu Xu
collection DOAJ
description Abstract Named Entity Recognition (NER) is an essential component of numerous Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems, with the aim of identifying and classifying entities that have specific meanings in raw text, such as person (PER), location (LOC), and organization (ORG). Recently, Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have been extensively applied to NER tasks owing to the rapid development of deep learning technology. However, despite their advancements, these models fail to take full advantage of the multi-level features (e.g., lexical phrases, keywords, capitalization, suffixes, etc.) of entities and the dependencies between different features. To address this issue, we propose a novel attention-based interactive multi-level feature fusion (AIMFF) framework, which aims to improve NER by obtaining multi-level features from different perspectives and interactively capturing the dependencies between different features. Our model is composed of four parts: the input, feature extraction, feature fusion, and sequence-labeling layers. First, we generate the original word- and character-level embeddings in the input layer. Then, we incorporate four parallel components to capture global word-level, local word-level, global character-level, and local character-level features in the feature extraction layer to enrich word embeddings with comprehensive multi-level semantic features. Next, we adopt cross-attention in the feature fusion layer to fuse features by exploiting the interaction between word- and character-level features. Finally, the fused features are fed into the sequence labeling layer to predict the word labels. We conducted generous comparative experiments on three datasets, and the experimental results showed that our model achieved better performance than several state-of-the-art models.
format Article
id doaj-art-5b5cf4384b7e449b8eeed43170cf8fdb
institution Kabale University
issn 2045-2322
language English
publishDate 2025-01-01
publisher Nature Portfolio
record_format Article
series Scientific Reports
spelling doaj-art-5b5cf4384b7e449b8eeed43170cf8fdb2025-01-26T12:29:38ZengNature PortfolioScientific Reports2045-23222025-01-0115111610.1038/s41598-025-86718-0Attention-based interactive multi-level feature fusion for named entity recognitionYiwu Xu0Yun Chen1Guangzhou Institute of Science and TechnologyNanfang College GuangzhouAbstract Named Entity Recognition (NER) is an essential component of numerous Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems, with the aim of identifying and classifying entities that have specific meanings in raw text, such as person (PER), location (LOC), and organization (ORG). Recently, Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have been extensively applied to NER tasks owing to the rapid development of deep learning technology. However, despite their advancements, these models fail to take full advantage of the multi-level features (e.g., lexical phrases, keywords, capitalization, suffixes, etc.) of entities and the dependencies between different features. To address this issue, we propose a novel attention-based interactive multi-level feature fusion (AIMFF) framework, which aims to improve NER by obtaining multi-level features from different perspectives and interactively capturing the dependencies between different features. Our model is composed of four parts: the input, feature extraction, feature fusion, and sequence-labeling layers. First, we generate the original word- and character-level embeddings in the input layer. Then, we incorporate four parallel components to capture global word-level, local word-level, global character-level, and local character-level features in the feature extraction layer to enrich word embeddings with comprehensive multi-level semantic features. Next, we adopt cross-attention in the feature fusion layer to fuse features by exploiting the interaction between word- and character-level features. Finally, the fused features are fed into the sequence labeling layer to predict the word labels. We conducted generous comparative experiments on three datasets, and the experimental results showed that our model achieved better performance than several state-of-the-art models.https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-86718-0Named entity recognitionMulti-level featuresCross-attentionFeature fusion
spellingShingle Yiwu Xu
Yun Chen
Attention-based interactive multi-level feature fusion for named entity recognition
Scientific Reports
Named entity recognition
Multi-level features
Cross-attention
Feature fusion
title Attention-based interactive multi-level feature fusion for named entity recognition
title_full Attention-based interactive multi-level feature fusion for named entity recognition
title_fullStr Attention-based interactive multi-level feature fusion for named entity recognition
title_full_unstemmed Attention-based interactive multi-level feature fusion for named entity recognition
title_short Attention-based interactive multi-level feature fusion for named entity recognition
title_sort attention based interactive multi level feature fusion for named entity recognition
topic Named entity recognition
Multi-level features
Cross-attention
Feature fusion
url https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-86718-0
work_keys_str_mv AT yiwuxu attentionbasedinteractivemultilevelfeaturefusionfornamedentityrecognition
AT yunchen attentionbasedinteractivemultilevelfeaturefusionfornamedentityrecognition