Statistical named entity recognizer adaptation

Abstract

Named entity recognition (NER) is a subtask of widely-recognized utility of information extraction (IE). NER has been explored in depth to provide rapid characterization of newswire data (Sundheim, 1995; Palmer and Day, 1997). The NER task involves both identification of spans of text referring to named entities, and categorization of these entities into classes based on the role they fill in context. The sentence "Washington announced that Washington ate seven hotdogs in Washington" provides an example in which a single name can arguably refer to three different entities: an organization, a person, and a location.