Most related to our paper is the work by Ghaddar and Langlais (2017) which demonstrates the impact of transfer learning of the English CoNLL 2003 dataset with Wikipedia annotations.
bidirectional LSTMSs (BiL-STMs, e.g., Reimers and Gurevych, 2017) identify informative features directly from the data, presented as word and/or character embeddings (e.g., Mikolov et al., 2013;Bojanowski et al., 2017).