Sekine Satoshi, Ranchhod Elisabete (eds.). Named Entities: Recognition, Classification and Use

John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2009. — 177 p. — (Benjamins Current Topics 19).Named Entities provides critical information for many NLP applications. Named Entity recognition and classification (NERC) in text is recognized as one of the important sub-tasks of Information Extraction (IE). The seven papers in this volume cover various interesting and informative aspects of NERC research. Nadeau & Sekine provide an extensive survey of past NERC technologies, which should be a very useful resource for new researchers in this field. Smith & Osborne describe a machine learning model which tries to solve the over-fitting problem. Mazur & Dale tackle a common problem of NE and conjunction; as conjunctions are often a part of NEs or appear close to NEs, this is an important practical problem. A further three papers describe analyses and implementations of NERC for different languages: Spanish (Galicia-Haro & Gelbukh), Bengali (Ekbal, Naskar & Bandyopadhyay), and Serbian (Vitas, Krstev & Maurel). Finally, Steinberger & Pouliquen report on a real WEB application where multilingual NERC technology is used to identify occurrences of people, locations and organizations in newspapers in different languages.