Named Entity Recognition Article Index for
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Information About

Named Entity Recognition




For example, a NER system producing MUC -style output might Tag the sentence,

Jim bought 300 shares of Acme Corp. in 2006.

:''Jim'''''' bought ''''''300'''''' shares of ''''''Acme Corp.'''''' in ''''''2006''''''''.

NER systems have been created that use linguistic Grammar -based techniques as well as Statistical Model s. Hand-crafted grammar-based systems typically obtain better results, but at the cost of months of work by experienced Linguists . Statistical NER systems typically require a large amount manually Annotated training data.

Since about 1998, there has been a great deal of interest in entity identification in the Molecular Biology , Bioinformatics , and medical Natural Language Processing communities. The most common entity of interest in that domain has been names of genes and gene products.


NAMED ENTITY TYPES


In the expression ''named entity'', the word ''named'' restricts the task to those entities for which one or many Rigid Designator s, as defined by Kripke , stands for the referent. For instance, the ''automotive company created by Henry Ford in 1903'' is referred to as ''Ford'' or ''Ford Motor Company''. Rigid designators include proper names as well as certain natural kind terms like biological species and substances.

There is a general agreement to include temporal expressions and some numerical expressions such as money and measures in named entities. While some instances of these types are good examples of rigid designators (e.g., the year 2001) there are also many invalid ones (e.g., I take my vacations in “June”). In the first case, the year ''2001'' refers to the ''2001st year of the Gregorian calendar''. In the second case, the month ''June'' may refer to the month of an undefined year (''past June'', ''next June'', ''June 2020'', etc.). It is arguable that the named entity definition is loosened in such cases for practical reasons.

At least two and consists of 29 types and 64 subtypes. Sekine's extended hierarchy {Link without Title} , proposed in 2002, is made of 200 subtypes.


EVALUATION


Benchmarking and evaluations have been performed in the '' Message Understanding Conference s'' (MUC) organized by DARPA , ''International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC)'', ''Computational Natural Language Learning ( CoNLL )'' workshops, ''Automatic Content Extraction'' (ACE) organized by NIST , the '' Multilingual Entity Task Conference '' (MET), ''Information Retrieval and Extraction Exercise'' (IREX) and in ''HAREM'' (Portuguese language only).

State-of-the-art systems produce near-human performance. For instance, the best system entering MUC-7 scored 93.39% of F-measure while human annotators scored 97.60% and 96.95%.


EXTERNAL LINKS


Evaluation forums




Datasets and hierarchies



Software


Open source or free

  • ABNER Biomedical named entity recognizer.

  • ANNIE Information extraction package (a GATE component) with NER capabilities.

  • Balie Baseline implementation of named entity recognition.

  • ESpotter A domain and user adaptation approach for named entity recognition on the Web.

  • FreeLing An open source language analysis tool suite. See the online demo .

  • MinorThird Collection of Java classes for storing text, annotating text, and learning to extract entities and categorize text.

  • Named Entity Tagger Yet another demo system for named entity tagging. Allows users to enter their own text.

  • POSBIOTM/W NER client tool that enables users to automatically annotate biomedical-related entities.