Dictionary-based matching graph network for biomedical named entity recognition

Abstract Biomedical named entity recognition (BioNER) is an essential task in biomedical information analysis. Recently, deep neural approaches have become widely utilized for BioNER. Biomedical dictionaries, implemented through a masked manner, are frequently employed in these methods to enhance entity recognition. However, their performance remains limited. In this work, we propose a dictionary-based matching graph network for BioNER. This approach utilizes the matching graph method to project all possible dictionary-based entity combinations in the text onto a directional graph. The network is implemented coherently with a bi-directional graph convolutional network (BiGCN) that incorporates the matching graph information. Our proposed approach fully leverages the dictionary-based matching graph instead of a simple masked manner. We have conducted numerous experiments on five typical Bio-NER datasets. The proposed model shows significant improvements in F1 score compared to the state-of-the-art (SOTA) models: 2.8% on BC2GM, 1.3% on BC4CHEMD, 1.1% on BC5CDR, 1.6% on NCBI-disease, and 0.5% on JNLPBA. The results show that our model, which is superior to other models, can effectively recognize natural biomedical named entities.