KGGCN: A Unified Knowledge Graph-Enhanced Graph Convolutional Network Framework for Chinese Named Entity Recognition

Recent advances in Chinese Named Entity Recognition (CNER) have integrated lexical features and factual knowledge into pretrained language models. However, existing lexicon-based methods often inject knowledge as restricted, isolated token-level information, lacking rich semantic and structural context. Knowledge graphs (KGs), comprising relational triples, offer explicit relational semantics and reasoning capabilities, while Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) effectively capture complex sentence structures. We propose KGGCN, a unified KG-enhanced GCN framework for CNER. KGGCN introduces external factual knowledge without disrupting the original word order, employing a novel end-append serialization scheme and a visibility matrix to control interaction scope. The model further utilizes a two-phase GCN stack, combining a standard GCN for robust aggregation with a multi-head attention GCN for adaptive structural refinement, to capture multi-level structural information. Experiments on four Chinese benchmark datasets demonstrate KGGCN’s superior performance. It achieves the highest F1-scores on MSRA (95.96%) and Weibo (71.98%), surpassing previous bests by 0.26 and 1.18 percentage points, respectively. Additionally, KGGCN obtains the highest Recall on OntoNotes (84.28%) and MSRA (96.14%), and the highest Precision on MSRA (95.82%), Resume (96.40%), and Weibo (72.14%). These results highlight KGGCN’s effectiveness in leveraging structured knowledge and multi-phase graph modeling to enhance entity recognition accuracy and coverage across diverse Chinese texts.