text: The problem of entity-typing has been studied predominantly in supervised learning fashion, mostly with task-specific annotations (for coarse types) and sometimes with distant supervision (for fine types). While such approaches have strong performance within datasets, they often lack the flexibility to transfer across text genres and to generalize to new type taxonomies. In this work we propose a zero-shot entity typing approach that requires no annotated data and can flexibly identify newly defined types. Given a type taxonomy defined as Boolean functions of FREEBASE "types", we ground a given mention to a set of type-compatible Wikipedia entries and then infer the target mention's types using an inference algorithm that makes use of the types of these entries. We evaluate our system on a broad range of datasets, including standard fine-grained and coarse-grained entity typing datasets, and also a dataset in the biological domain. Our system is shown to be competitive with state-of-the-art supervised NER systems and outperforms them on out-of-domain datasets. We also show that our system significantly outperforms other zero-shot fine typing systems.
  @cite_37: We have recently completed the sixth in a series of "Message Understanding Conferences" which are designed to promote and evaluate research in information extraction. MUC-6 introduced several innovations over prior MUCs, most notably in the range of different tasks for which evaluations were conducted. We describe some of the motivations for the new format and briefly discuss some of the results of the evaluations.
  @cite_7: We analyze some of the fundamental design challenges and misconceptions that underlie the development of an efficient and robust NER system. In particular, we address issues such as the representation of text chunks, the inference approach needed to combine local NER decisions, the sources of prior knowledge and how to use them within an NER system. In the process of comparing several solutions to these challenges we reach some surprising conclusions, as well as develop an NER system that achieves 90.8 F1 score on the CoNLL-2003 NER shared task, the best reported result for this dataset.
  @cite_21: It is often claimed that Named Entity recognition systems need extensive gazetteers---lists of names of people, organisations, locations, and other named entities. Indeed, the compilation of such gazetteers is sometimes mentioned as a bottleneck in the design of Named Entity recognition systems.We report on a Named Entity recognition system which combines rule-based grammars with statistical (maximum entropy) models. We report on the system's performance with gazetteers of different types and different sizes, using test material from the MUC-7 competition. We show that, for the text type and task of this competition, it is sufficient to use relatively small gazetteers of well-known names, rather than large gazetteers of low-frequency names. We conclude with observations about the domain independence of the competition and of our experiments.
  @cite_0: We describe the CoNLL-2003 shared task: language-independent named entity recognition. We give background information on the data sets (English and German) and the evaluation method, present a general overview of the systems that have taken part in the task and discuss their performance.
  @cite_10: This paper presents a classifier-combination experimental framework for named entity recognition in which four diverse classifiers (robust linear classifier, maximum entropy, transformation-based learning, and hidden Markov model) are combined under different conditions. When no gazetteer or other additional training resources are used, the combined system attains a performance of 91.6F on the English development data; integrating name, location and person gazetteers, and named entity systems trained on additional, more general, data reduces the F-measure error by a factor of 15 to 21 on the English data.
summary: Named Entity Recognition (NER), for which the goal is to discover mention-boundaries in addition to typing, often using a small set of mutually exclusive types, has a considerable amount of work @cite_37 @cite_21 @cite_0 @cite_10 @cite_7 .