Wukong-CMNER: A Large-Scale Chinese Multimodal NER Dataset with Images Modality

So far, Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (MNER) has been performed almost exclusively on English corpora. Chinese phrases are not naturally segmented, making Chinese NER more challenging; nonetheless, Chinese MNER needs to be paid more attention. Thus, we first construct Wukong-CMNER, a multimodal NER dataset for the Chinese corpus that includes images and text. There are 55,423 annotated image-text pairs in our corpus. Based on this dataset, we propose a lexicon-based prompting visual clue extraction (LPE) module to capture certain entity-related visual clues from the image. We further introduce a novel cross-modal alignment (CA) module to make the representations of the two modalities more consistent through contrastive learning. Through extensive experiments, we observe that: (1) Discernible performance boosts as we move from unimodal to multimodal, verifying the necessity of integrating visual clues into Chinese NER. (2) Cross-modal alignment module further improves the performance of the model. (3) Our two modules decouple from the subsequent predicting process, which enables a plug-and-play framework to enhance Chinese NER models for Chinese MNER task. LPE and CA achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on Wukong-CMNER when combined with W2NER [11], demonstrating its effectiveness.