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nlpnamed-entity-recognitionnamed-entity-extraction

Difference between named entity recognition and resolution?


What is the difference between named entity recognition and named entity resolution? Would appreciate a practical example.


Solution

  • Named entity recognition is picking up the names and classifying them in running text. E.g., given (1)

    John Terry to face criminal charges over alleged racist abuse
    

    an NE recognizer will output

    [PER John Terry] to face criminal charges over alleged racist abuse
    

    NE resolution or normalization means finding out which entity in the outside world a name refers to. E.g., in the above example, the output would be annotated with a unique identifier for the footballer John Terry, like his Wikipedia URL:

    [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Terry John Terry] to face criminal charges
    over alleged racist abuse
    

    as opposed to, e.g.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Terry_%28actor%29
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Terry_%28baseball%29
    

    or any of the other John Terry's the Wikipedia knows.