BiLSTM-CRF for Persian Named-Entity Recognition ArmanPersoNERCorpus: the First Entity-Annotated Persian Dataset.

Named-entity recognition (NER) can still be regarded as work in progress for a number of Asian languages due to the scarcity of annotated corpora. For this reason, with this paper we publicly release an entity-annotated Persian dataset and we present a performing approach for Persian NER based on a deep learning architecture. In addition to the entity-annotated dataset, we release a number of word embeddings (including GloVe, skip-gram, CBOW and Hellinger PCA) trained on a sizable collation of Persian text. The combination of the deep learning architecture (a BiLSTM-CRF) and the pre-trained word embeddings has allowed us to achieve a 77:45% CoNLL F1 score, a result that is more than 12 percentage points higher than the best previous result and interesting in absolute terms.