Product named entity recognition in Chinese text

There are many expressive and structural differences between product names and general named entities such as person names, location names and organization names. To date, there has been little research on product named entity recognition (NER), which is crucial and valuable for information extraction in the field of market intelligence. This paper focuses on product NER (PRO NER) in Chinese text. First, we describe our efforts on data annotation, including well-defined specifications, data analysis and development of a corpus with annotated product named entities. Second, a hierarchical hidden Markov model-based approach to PRO NER is proposed and evaluated. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method outperforms the cascaded maximum entropy model and obtains promising results on the data sets of two different electronic product domains (digital and cell phone).