July 2016
Beginner to intermediate
462 pages
9h 14m
English
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Recognizing named entities
Named-entity recognition (NER) tries to detect names of persons, organizations, locations, and other names in texts. Some NER systems are almost as good as humans, but it is not an easy task. Named entities usually start with upper case, such as Ivan. We should, therefore, not change the case of words when applying NER.
NLTK has support for the Stanford NER API. This is a Java API, so you need to have Java on your system. I tested the code with Java 1.8.0_65. The code in this recipe downloads the most recent Stanford NER archive (stanford-ner-2015-04-20.zip/3.5.2) as of October 2015. If you want another version, take a look at http://nlp.stanford.edu/software/CRF-NER.shtml (retrieved October 2015).
Getting ready
Install ...