Improved Named Entity Recognition using Machine Translation-based Cross-lingual Information

In this paper, we describe a technique to improve named entity recognition in a resource-poor language (Hindi) by using cross-lingual information. We use an on-line machine translation system and a separate word alignment phase to find the projection of each Hindi word into the translated English sentence. We estimate the cross-lingual features using an English named entity recognizer and the alignment information. We use these cross-lingual features in a support vector machine-based classifier. The use of cross-lingual features improves F1 score by 2.1 points absolute (2.9% relative) over a good-performing baseline model.