Why look for named entities?

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is the act of locating certain people, places, and things in a larger body of text. Finding the specific entities that are being discussed in a text is a critical task for creating better chatbots, for creating better Question Answering (QA) systems, or for helping speech recognition systems do a better job. When I am preparing dinner in my kitchen, if I ask Amazon Echo to tell me about meatloaf, will I get a description of the food, or of Meatloaf the musician? (For those who are wondering, I tried this at home and Echo responded with a description of the musician!)

Note

Named entity recognition should not be confused with the tasks we performed in Chapter 3, Entity Matching, earlier in this book. The two tasks are similar in that they both deal with nouns, called entities, but the comparison ends there. While NER tries to locate the entities in text, EM tries to figure out whether two entities are the same thing.

Named entity recognition...