Keep Your Bearings: Lightly-Supervised Information Extraction with Ladder Networks That Avoids Semantic Drift

AbstractWe propose a novel approach to semi-supervised learning for information extraction that uses ladder networks (Rasmus et al., 2015). In particular, we focus on the task of named entity classification, defined as identifying the correct label (e.g., person or organization name) of an entity mention in a given context. Our approach is simple, efficient and has the benefit of being robust to semantic drift, a dominant problem in most semi-supervised learning systems. We empirically demonstrate the superior performance of our system compared to the state-of-the-art on two standard datasets for named entity classification. We obtain between 62% and 200% improvement over the state-of-art baseline on these two datasets.