Bangor University at WojoodNER 2024: Advancing Arabic Named Entity Recognition with CAMeLBERT-Mix

AbstractThis paper describes the approach and results of Bangor University’s participation in the WojoodNER 2024 shared task, specifically for Subtask-1: Closed-Track Flat Fine-Grain NER. We present a system utilizing a transformer-based model called bert-base-arabic-camelbert-mix, fine-tuned on the Wojood-Fine corpus. A key enhancement to our approach involves adding a linear layer on top of the bert-base-arabic-camelbert-mix to classify each token into one of 51 different entity types and subtypes, as well as the ‘O’ label for non-entity tokens. This linear layer effectively maps the contextualized embeddings produced by BERT to the desired output labels, addressing the complex challenges of fine-grained Arabic NER. The system achieved competitive results in precision, recall, and F1 scores, thereby contributing significant insights into the application of transformers in Arabic NER tasks.