PAP_NER: A large-scale vietnamese administrative named entity recognition corpus and hybrid deep learning architecture

D Dinh-Dien La T Tien-Bang Tran N Ngoc-Huy Du N Ngoc-Hung Dang T Trung-Nghia Phung V Van-Khanh Tran

Abstract

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is fundamental for automating administrative document processing in digital government systems. However, Vietnamese NLP research faces a critical infrastructure gap: existing datasets focus on generic information extraction (news, medical) rather than domain-specific administrative text. We present PAP_NER, the first large-scale, gold-standard Vietnamese administrative NER corpus comprising 162,801 sentences with 205,807 entity annotations across five entity types critical for e-Government workflows: Agency (CQ), Legal Document (VBPL), Object (ĐT), Datetime (NG), and Quantity (SL). The dataset was constructed through a rigorous human-in-the-loop annotation pipeline, achieving an inter-annotator agreement of κ = 0.85. We demonstrate PAP_NER’s value through comprehensive benchmarking of an established hybrid deep learning architecture, PhoBERT-CRF, which couples monolingual Transformer embeddings (PhoBERT) with Conditional Random Fields for structured prediction. PhoBERT-CRF achieves 97.95% Micro F1-score on the PAP_NER test set, significantly outperforming established baselines: BiLSTM+CRF (+2.01%), multilingual XLM-RoBERTa (+2.52%), and pure Transformer approaches (+0.44%). Ablation analysis reveals that the CRF layer provides statistically significant improvements for structurally complex entities (VBPL: + 0.96%, p  < 0.05, McNemar’s test). We release PAP_NER publicly (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18044019 ) under Creative Commons BY 4.0 license to support reproducibility and enable further research in Vietnamese administrative NLP. This work establishes a foundational dataset and methodology for addressing the Vietnamese government NER gap, with implications for low-resource language NLP research.

Article Details

Journal PLoS ONE
Volume / Issue Vol. 21, Issue 7
Published July 27, 2026
Pages e0353166
ISSN 1932-6203
Publisher Public Library of Science

Journal Info

PLoS ONE

Public Library of Science

ISSN: 1932-6203 Open Access Health Sciences

Authors (6)

D

Dinh-Dien La

T

Tien-Bang Tran

N

Ngoc-Huy Du

N

Ngoc-Hung Dang

T

Trung-Nghia Phung

V

Van-Khanh Tran