  In this paper, we propose a novel bipartite flat-graph network (BiFlaG) for
nested named entity recognition (NER), which contains two subgraph modules: a
flat NER module for outermost entities and a graph module for all the entities
located in inner layers. Bidirectional LSTM (BiLSTM) and graph convolutional
network (GCN) are adopted to jointly learn flat entities and their inner
dependencies. Different from previous models, which only consider the
unidirectional delivery of information from innermost layers to outer ones (or
outside-to-inside), our model effectively captures the bidirectional
interaction between them. We first use the entities recognized by the flat NER
module to construct an entity graph, which is fed to the next graph module. The
richer representation learned from graph module carries the dependencies of
inner entities and can be exploited to improve outermost entity predictions.
Experimental results on three standard nested NER datasets demonstrate that our
BiFlaG outperforms previous state-of-the-art models.
