Fine-grained General Entity Typing in German using GermaNet

Fine-grained entity typing is important to tasks like relation extraction and knowledge base construction. We find however, that fine-grained entity typing systems perform poorly on general entities (e.g. “ex-president”) as compared to named entities (e.g. “Barack Obama”). This is due to a lack of general entities in existing training data sets. We show that this problem can be mitigated by automatically generating training data from WordNets. We use a German WordNet equivalent, GermaNet, to automatically generate training data for German general entity typing. We use this data to supplement named entity data to train a neural fine-grained entity typing system. This leads to a 10% improvement in accuracy of the prediction of level 1 FIGER types for German general entities, while decreasing named entity type prediction accuracy by only 1%.