PFMRC: A Unified MRC Framework for Chinese Named Entity Recognition via Semantic Feature Fusion

The landscape of natural language processing (NLP) has been revolutionized by advancements that enable the upstream training of knowledge-rich models for downstream tasks, particularly named entity recognition (NER). Traditional NER approaches, treating it as a sequence labeling problem, often fail to deeply understand the whole text and to capture syntactic nuances of text. To address these issues, we introduce PFMRC, a novel machine reading comprehension (MRC) framework that leverages the strengths of both contextual semantics and syntactic information for enhanced NER performance. PFMRC employs a dual-pronged feature extraction strategy, utilizing RoBERTa and BiGRU to encode text features for contextual semantic information and representing them as node features of the graph structure, and a weighted embedding representation to translate syntactic dependencies into graph-structured edge features. Our model further incorporates Graph Attention Networks (GAT) to harmonize node and edge features, facilitating a nuanced understanding of text. The integration of prior knowledge and the modeling of intricate syntactic relationships through Graph Attention Networks (GAT) not only improves entity recognition accuracy but also enriches the feature representation, leading to more robust NER outcomes. Extensive experiments on three Chinese datasets demonstrate PFMRC's superior performance over state-of-the-art models.