Recognizing Chinese judicial named entity using BiLSTM-CRF

Named entity recognition (NER) plays an essential role in natural language processing systems. Judicial NER is a fundamental component of judicial information retrieval, entity relation extraction, and knowledge map building. However, Chinese judicial NER remains to be more challenging due to the characteristics of Chinese and high accuracy requirements in the judicial filed. Thus, in this paper, we propose a deep learning-based method named BiLSTM-CRF which consists of bi-directional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) and conditional random fields (CRF). For further accuracy promotion, we propose to use Adaptive moment estimation (Adam) for optimization of the model. To validate our method, we perform experiments on judgment documents including commutation, parole and temporary service outside prison, which is acquired from China Judgments Online. Experimental results achieve the accuracy of 0.876, recall of 0.856 and F1 score of 0.855, which suggests the superiority of the proposed BiLSTM-CRF with Adam optimizer.