Enhancing traditional Chinese medical named entity recognition with Dyn-Att Net: a dynamic attention approach

Our study focuses on Traditional Chinese Medical (TCM) named entity recognition (NER), which involves identifying and extracting specific entity names from TCM record. This task has significant implications for doctors and researchers, as it enables the automated identification of relevant TCM terms, ultimately enhancing research efficiency and accuracy. However, the current Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers-Long Short Term Memory-Conditional Random Fields (BERT-LSTM-CRF) model for TCM NER is constrained by a traditional structure, limiting its capacity to fully harness the advantages provided by Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) and long short term memory (LSTM) models. Through comparative experiments, we also observed that the straightforward superimposition of models actually leads to a decrease in recognition results. To optimize the structure of the traditional BERT-BiLSTM-CRF model and obtain more effective text representations, we propose the Dyn-Att Net model, which introduces dynamic attention and a parallel structure. By integrating BERT and LSTM models with the dynamic attention mechanism, our model effectively captures semantic, contextual, and sequential relations within text sequences, resulting in high accuracy. To validate the effectiveness of our model, we compared it with nine other models in TCM dataset namely the publicly available PaddlePaddle dataset. Our Dyn-Att Net model, based on BERT, outperforms the other models, achieving an F1 score of 81.91%, accuracy of 92.06%, precision of 80.26%, and recall of 83.76%. Furthermore, its robust generalization capability is substantiated through validation on the APTNER, MSRA, and EduNER datasets. Overall, the Dyn-Att Net model not only enhances NER accuracy within the realm of traditional Chinese medicine, but also showcases considerable potential for cross-domain generalization. Moreover, the Dyn-Att Net model’s parallel architecture facilitates efficient computation, contributing to time-saving efforts in NER tasks.