Boosting Information Extraction Systems with Character-level Neural Networks and Free Noisy Supervision

We present an architecture to boost the precision of existing information extraction systems. This is achieved by augmenting the existing parser, which may be constraint-based or hybrid statistical, with a character-level neural network. Our architecture combines the ability of constraint-based or hybrid extraction systems to easily incorporate domain knowledge with the ability of deep neural networks to leverage large amounts of data to learn complex features. The network is trained using a measure of consistency between extracted data and existing databases as a form of cheap, noisy supervision. Our architecture does not require large scale manual annotation or a system rewrite. It has led to large precision improvements over an existing, highly-tuned production information extraction system used at Bloomberg LP for financial language text.