Leveraging HTML in Free Text Web Named Entity Recognition
Colin Ashby, David James Weir · 2020
HTML tags are typically discarded in free text Named Entity Recognition from Web pages.We investigate whether these discarded tags might be used to improve NER performance.We compare Text+Tags sentences with their Text-Only equivalents, over five datasets, two free text segmentation granularities and two NER models.We find an increased F1 performance for Text+Tags of between 0.9% and 13.2% over all datasets, variants and models.This performance increase, over datasets of varying entity types, HTML density and construction quality, indicates our method is flexible and adaptable.These findings imply that a similar technique might be of use in other Web-aware NLP tasks, including the enrichment of deep language models.