  Sequence labeling architectures use word embeddings for capturing similarity,
but suffer when handling previously unseen or rare words. We investigate
character-level extensions to such models and propose a novel architecture for
combining alternative word representations. By using an attention mechanism,
the model is able to dynamically decide how much information to use from a
word- or character-level component. We evaluated different architectures on a
range of sequence labeling datasets, and character-level extensions were found
to improve performance on every benchmark. In addition, the proposed
attention-based architecture delivered the best results even with a smaller
number of trainable parameters.
