GHHT at CALCS 2018: Named Entity Recognition for Dialectal Arabic Using Neural Networks

Younes Samih
Wolfgang Maier
Third Workshop on Computational Approaches to Linguistic Code-switching in ACL 2018 (2018)

Abstract

This paper describes our system submission to the CALCS 2018 shared task on named entity recognition on code-switched data for the language variant pair of Modern Standard Arabic and Egyptian dialectal Arabic. We build a a Deep Neural Network that combines word and character-based representations in convolutional and recurrent networks with a CRF layer. The model is augmented with stacked layers of enriched information such pre-trained embeddings, Brown clusters and named entity gazetteers. Our system is ranked second among those participating in the shared task achieving an FB1 average of 70.09%.