When documents are analyzed, we often need to extract information about its contents and relationships between elements of the document. If we encounter a person's name, we may also be expecting that person's email address or phone number. These elements are referred to as entities. Named-entity recognition (NER) is the process of locating different types of entities within a document.
There are different types of entities, including names, addresses, dates, and locations. Likewise, there are different ways of isolating entities in text. We will be illustrating many of these approaches in this chapter.
There are several techniques we will demonstrate in this chapter. The variety of techniques will provide developers with options of how to find entities depending on the problem and environment in question. We will start with illustrations...