The process of finding people and things is referred to as Named Entity Recognition (NER). Entities such as people and places are associated with categories that have names, which identify what they are. A named category can be as simple as "people". Common entity types include:

Finding names, locations, and various things in a document are important and useful NLP tasks. They are used in many places such as conducting simple searches, processing queries, resolving references, the disambiguation of text, and finding the meaning of text. For example, NER is sometimes interested in only finding those entities that belong to a single category. Using categories, the search can be isolated to those item types. Other NLP tasks use NER such as in POS taggers and in performing cross-referencing tasks.

The NER process involves two tasks:

Detection is concerned with finding the...