Towards an approach based on particle swarm optimization for Arabic named entity recognition on social media

Abstract

Named entity recognition is an essential task for various applications related to natural language processing (NLP). It aims to retrieve a variety of named entities (NEs) from text and categorize them according to predetermined target categories. In many cases, using the entire feature set can be time-consuming and negatively impact the performance. Moreover, it is challenging to find the relevant subsets of features for a particular task due to the high number. The feature selection technique is an unsupervised process for selecting informative features by creating a new subset of informative features. This technique is used to enhance the underlying algorithm's performance. This article implements an effective feature selection algorithm using particle swarm optimization (PSO) to identify and classify the Arabic NEs in the text from social media. PSO is a search algorithm that utilizes a population of particles in a multidimensional space. The proposed method is evaluated using two publicly available Arabic Dialect social media datasets. It is demonstrated through comparisons with both baselines and previous models that the new approach achieves significant accuracy with considerably reduced feature sets in all parameters.