What is Named Entity Recognition?

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is also known as "Entity Identification". It is a Natural Language Processing (NLP) technique that seeks to locate and classify named entities mentioned in any form of unstructured text. Each word is identified in predefined categories like Organization, Place, Person, Time Expressions, Quantities, Monetary Values, Percentages, etc. Extraction of named entities from unstructured contextual data is beneficial for analyzing different types of textual data. With tremendous advancements in NLP, machines are getting smarter. They can now intelligently understand large volumes of textual data that result in numerous use-cases like machine translation, text summarization, etc. Named Entity Recognition is a sub-task of information extraction.