Multi-Granularity Cross-Modality Representation Learning for Named Entity Recognition on Social Media

Understand

Named Entity Recognition (NER) on social media refers to discovering and classifying entities from unstructured free-form content, and it plays an important role for various applications such as intention understanding and user recommendation.

• With social media posts tending to be multimodal, Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (MNER) for the text with its accompanying image is attracting more and more attention since some textual components can only be understood in combination with visual information.
• However, there are two drawbacks in existing approaches: 1) Meanings of the text and its accompanying image do not match always, so the text information still plays a major role.
• However, social media posts are usually shorter and more informal compared with other normal contents, which easily causes incomplete semantic description and the data sparsity problem.