Named entity recognition

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Revision as of 22:53, 7 August 2007 by Francis Tyers (talk | contribs)
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Named entity recognition is about recognising named entities, for example proper nouns, etc. in text. When working with long rules, one of the problems in having them applied can be proper nouns. For example, names, companies, places etc. that aren't in the dictionaries and thus are not analysed. So for example in a sentence like:

  • Die man het John gesien.

would be analysed something like (simplifying slightly):

  • Die<det> man<n> hê<vbhaver> *John gesien<vblex><past>

If we have a rule that says something like:

  • <vbhaver> <noun phrase> <vblex><past> → <vbhaver> <vblex><past> <noun phrase>

This will not apply, because "John" is not detected as anything. As a result the translation will be worse because the word re-ordering has not taken place. So, instead of getting:

  • The man had seen John

We would get:

  • The man had John seen.

Which is less than ideal.

Further reading