Abstract | The term “Named Entity”, now widely used in Natural Language Processing, was coined for the Sixth Message Understanding Conference (MUC-6) (R. Grishman & Sundheim 1996). At that time, MUC was focusing on Information Extraction (IE) tasks where structured information of company activities and defense related activities is extracted from unstructured text, such as newspaper articles. In defining the task, people noticed that it is essential to recognize information units like names, including person, organization and location names, and numeric expressions including time, date, money and percent expressions. Identifying references to these entities in text was recognized as one of the important sub-tasks of IE and was called “Named Entity Recognition and Classification (NERC)”. |
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