Multimedia Lab $@$ ACL WNUT NER Shared Task: Named Entity Recognition for Twitter Microposts using Distributed Word Representations
Fréderic Godin, Baptist Vandersmissen, Wesley De Neve, Rik Van de Walle · 2015
Due to the short and noisy nature of Twitter microposts, detecting named entities is often a cumbersome task.As part of the ACL2015 Named Entity Recognition (NER) shared task, we present a semisupervised system that detects 10 types of named entities.To that end, we leverage 400 million Twitter microposts to generate powerful word embeddings as input features and use a neural network to execute the classification.To further boost the performance, we employ dropout to train the network and leaky Rectified Linear Units (ReLUs).Our system achieved the fourth position in the final ranking, without using any kind of hand-crafted features such as lexical features or gazetteers.