A Beginner's Introduction to Named Entity Recognition (NER)

It is the process of identifying proper nouns from a piece of text and classifying them into appropriate categories. These categories can be generic like'Organization', 'Person', 'Location', etc. or they can be tailor-made for a particular application, e.g. When I first heard about NER, it sounded terribly boring and even trivial. You might be thinking, "Isn't this a simple lookup problem? Why do we even need ML here?"