Named Entity Recognition

Also known as: NER

Named entity recognition is the task of identifying and categorizing spans of text that refer to real-world entities such as people, organizations, locations, dates, and monetary values. Classical NER systems used hand-crafted features with conditional random fields or hidden Markov models; modern systems use fine-tuned transformers. NER is a core component in information extraction pipelines, search engines, and knowledge graph construction, where structured entity data is required from unstructured text.