Entity extraction
Named-entity recognition (NER) (also known as entity identification, entity chunking and entity extraction) is a subtask of information extraction that seeks to locate and classify named entities in text into pre-defined categories such as the names of persons, organizations, locations, expressions of times, quantities, monetary values, percentages, etc.
Most research on NER systems has been structured as taking an unannotated block of text, such as this one:
Jim bought 300 shares of Acme Corp. in 2006.
And producing an annotated block of text that highlights the names of entities:
[Jim]Person bought 300 shares of [Acme Corp.]Organization in [2006]Time.
In this example, a person name consisting of one token, a two-token company name and a temporal expression have been detected and classified.
State-of-the-art NER systems for English produce near-human performance. For example, the best system entering MUC-7 scored 93.39% of F-measure while human annotators scored 97.60% and 96.95%.
In the expression named entity, the word named restricts the task to those entities for which one or many strings, such as words or phrases, stands (fairly) consistently for some referent. This is closely related to rigid designators, as defined by Kripke (for example; see also ), although in practice NER deals with many names and referents that are not philosophically "rigid". For instance, the automotive company created by Henry Ford in 1903 can be referred to as Ford or Ford Motor Company, although "Ford" can refer to many other entities as well (see ). Rigid designators include proper names as well as terms for certain biological species and substances, but exclude pronouns (such as "it"; see coreference resolution), descriptions that pick out a referent by its properties (see also De dicto and de re), and names for kinds of things as opposed to individuals (for example "Bank").
Full named-entity recognition is often broken down, conceptually and possibly also in implementations, as two distinct problems: detection of names, and classification of the names by the type of entity they refer to (e.g. person, organization, location and other). The first phase is typically simplified to a segmentation problem: names are defined to be contiguous spans of tokens, with no nesting, so that "Bank of America" is a single name, disregarding the fact that inside this name, the substring "America" is itself a name. This segmentation problem is formally similar to chunking. The second phase requires choosing an ontology by which to organize categories of things.
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