Chinese named entity recognition: The state of the art

Named Entity Recognition(NER), one of the most fundamental problems in natural language processing, seeks to identify the boundaries and types of entities with specific meanings in natural language text. As an important international language, Chinese has uniqueness in many aspects, and Chinese NER (CNER) is receiving increasing attention. In this paper, we give a comprehensive survey of recent advances in CNER. We first introduce some preliminary knowledge, including the common datasets, tag schemes, evaluation metrics and difficulties of CNER. Then, we separately describe recent advances in traditional research and deep learning research of CNER, in which the CNER with deep learning is our focus. We summarize related works in a basic three-layer architecture, including character representation, context encoder, and context encoder and tag decoder. Meanwhile, the attention mechanism and adversarial-transfer learning methods based on this architecture are introduced. Finally, we present the future research trends and challenges of CNER.