Piggyback: Using Search Engines for Robust Cross-Domain Named Entity Recognition

Stefan Rued
Jens Mueller
Hinrich Schuetze
49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL-HLT), Association for Computational Linguistics (2011), pp. 965-975

Abstract

We use search engine results to address a particularly dif?cult cross-domain language processing task, the adaptation of named entity recognition (NER) from news text to web queries. The key novelty of the method is that we submit a token with context to a search engine and use similar contexts in the search results as additional information for correctly classifying the token. We achieve strong gains in NER performance on news, in-domain and out-of-domain, and on web queries.