Simple Semantic-based Data Augmentation for Named Entity Recognition in Biomedical Texts

AbstractData augmentation is important in addressing data sparsity and low resources in NLP. Unlike data augmentation for other tasks such as sentence-level and sentence-pair ones, data augmentation for named entity recognition (NER) requires preserving the semantic of entities. To that end, in this paper we propose a simple semantic-based data augmentation method for biomedical NER. Our method leverages semantic information from pre-trained language models for both entity-level and sentence-level. Experimental results on two datasets: i2b2-2010 (English) and VietBioNER (Vietnamese) showed that the proposed method could improve NER performance.