Entities recognition: the engineering problem
As in every engineering endeavor, when you face the problem of automating the identification of entities (proper names: people, places, organizations, etc.) mentioned in a particular text, you should look for the right balance between quality (in terms of precision and recall) and cost from the perspective of your goals. You may be tempted to compile a simple list of such entities and apply simple but straightforward pattern matching techniques to identify a predefined set of entities appearing “literally” in a particular piece of news, in a tweet or in a (transcribed) phone call. If this solution is enough for your purposes (you can achieve high precision at the cost of a low recall), it is clear that quality was not among your priorities. However… What if you can add a bit of excellence to your solution without technological burden for… free? If you are interested in this proposition, skip the following detailed technological discussion and go directly to the final section by clicking here.
