Enhanced Chinese named entity recognition with multi-granularity BERT adapter and efficient global pointer

Named Entity Recognition (NER) plays a crucial role in the field of Natural Language Processing, holding significant value in applications such as information extraction, knowledge graphs, and question–answering systems. However, Chinese NER faces challenges such as semantic complexity, uncertain entity boundaries, and nested structures. To address these issues, this study proposes an innovative approach, namely Multi-Granularity BERT Adapter and Efficient Global Pointer (MGBERT-Pointer). The semantic encoding layer adopts Multi-Granularity Adapter (MGA), while the decoding layer employs Efficient Global Pointer (EGP) network, ensuring collaborative functionality. The MGA, incorporating Character Adapter, Entity Adapter, and Lexicon Adapter through interactive mechanisms, are deeply integrated into the BERT base, significantly enhancing the model’s ability to handle complex contexts and ambiguities. The EGP, utilizing Rotary Position Embedding, resolves the issue of insufficient boundary information in traditional attention mechanisms, thereby improving the model’s understanding and recognition of nested entity structures. Experimental results on four public datasets demonstrate a significant enhancement in Chinese NER performance achieved by the MGBERT-Pointer model.