We started our chapter on POS-tagging by expanding an acronym, and we'll be doing the same here as well. NER stands for Named Entity Recognition, and along with part of speech tagging, it is one of the pillars of natural language processing.
Let's us start by understanding what a named entity is. A named entity is a real-world object with a proper name – examples are France, Donald Trump, and Twitter. In these examples, France is a country and would be identified as a GPE (Geopolitical Entity), Donald Trump as PER (a person), and Twitter is a company, so identified as an ORG (Organization). In a study titled A survey of named entity recognition and classification by David Nadeau and Satoshi Sekine (New York University) ...
