Appendix 5: Named Entities: Current Definitions
Damien Nouvel, Maud Ehrmann, Sophie Rosset · 2016
This appendix provides a non-exhaustive list of different definitions applied to named entities.These descriptions are taken from research program reports, general works on NLP, publications relating specifically to named entities, online encyclopedias and the Websites of companies which offer information processing services.This list provides a good overview of the general discourse concerning named entities, although readers should remember that definitions may refer to relatively different contexts and applications.In research programs: MUC-7: "On the level of entity extraction, Named Entities (NE) were defined as proper names and quantities of interest.Person, organization, and location names were marked as well as dates, times, percentages, and monetary amounts"[CHI 98]."The Named Entity task consists of three subtasks (entity names, temporal expressions, number expressions).The expressions to be annotated are 'unique identifiers' of entities (organization, persons, locations), times (dates, times), and quantities (monetary values, percentages)" [CHI 97].CoNNL: "Named entities are phrases that contain the names of persons, organizations and locations" [TJO 03].ESTER: "While no standard definition exists, NE may be said to constitute a particular type of lexical unit referring to a real-world entity in certain Named Entities for Computational Linguistics,