Named Entity Recognition for Crop Diseases and Pests Based on Gated Fusion Unit and Manhattan Attention

Named entity recognition (NER) is a crucial step in building knowledge graphs for crop diseases and pests. To enhance NER accuracy, we propose a new NER model—GatedMan—based on the gated fusion unit and Manhattan attention. GatedMan utilizes RoBERTa as a pre-trained model and enhances it using bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) to extract features from the context. It uses a gated unit to perform weighted fusion between the outputs of RoBERTa and BiLSTM, thereby enriching the information flow. The fused output is then fed into a novel Manhattan attention mechanism to capture the long-range dependencies. The global optimum tagging sequence is obtained using the conditional random fields layer. To enhance the model’s robustness, we incorporate adversarial training using the fast gradient method. This introduces adversarial examples, allowing the model to learn more disturbance-resistant feature representations, thereby improving its performance against unknown inputs. GatedMan achieved F1 scores of 93.73%, 94.13%, 93.98%, and 96.52% on the AgCNER, Peoples_daily, MSRA, and Resume datasets, respectively, thereby outperforming the other models. Experimental results demonstrate that GatedMan accurately identifies entities related to crop diseases and pests and exhibits high generalizability in other domains.