Named Entity Recognition in Bengali: A Conditional Random Field Approach
Asif Ekbal, Rejwanul Haque, Sivaji Bandyopadhyay · 2008
This paper reports about the development of a Named Entity Recognition (NER) system for Bengali using the statistical Conditional Random Fields (CRFs). The system makes use of the different contextual information of the words along with the variety of features that are helpful in predicting the various named entity (NE) classes. A portion of the partially NE tagged Bengali news corpus, developed from the archive of a leading Bengali newspaper available in the web, has been used to develop the system. The training set consists of 150K words and has been manually annotated with a NE tagset of seventeen tags. Experimental results of the 10-fold cross validation test show the effectiveness of the proposed CRF based NER system with an overall average Recall, Precision and F-Score values of 93.8%, 87.8% and 90.7%, respectively. 1