Named Entity Recognition is a very useful process of Natural Language Processing(NLP) which generally deals with identifying and classifying named entities. The unstructured text is taken and classified into various named entities categories like organizations, persons, places, time, etc. So basically, named entities are properly identified and segmented into many classes.
Named Entity Recognition systems are generally developed with various statistical and machine learning methods. NER has many applications for business purposes.
It is basically a sub-task of data extraction that looks to locate and order named entities referenced in unstructured text into some predefined classes, for example, organizations, person names, percentages, quantities, monetary values, locations, etc.
How do Named Entity Recognition works?
While reading the text, we intuitively identify items such as values, individuals, locations, and so on. For example, in the sentence "Elon Musk co-founded and leads Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink and The Boring Company
However, we must first teach computers in recognizing entities so that they can categorize them. Machine learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP) play a very important part in doing so.
Machine learning and Deep learning help machines to learn, develop and improve over time, while Natural language processing properly analyses the structure and norms of language and creates intelligent systems that are capable of deriving the meaning from speech and text. NER is a platform with which we will be able to detect a word or group of words that comprise an entity (e.g. Apple) and know which entity group it belongs to in order to learn what it is.
Hence, to begin with, we must establish entity categories such as Name, Company, locations, and so on, and then feed proper training data to a NER model. After that, you may teach your model to detect entities by tagging some sample words coupled with their matching entities.
Implementation:
## Installation of Spacy library
!pip install spacy==3.0.6
## Initializing named entity recognition function
nlp = en_core_web_sm.load()
## Input text:
raw_text="""Elon Reeve Musk FRS is an entrepreneur and business magnate. He is the founder, CEO, and Chief Engineer at SpaceX; early stage investor, CEO, and Product Architect of Tesla, Inc.; founder of The Boring Company; and co-founder of Neuralink and OpenAI.He lives in United States."""
## Passing input text into the named entity recognition model
text1= nlp(raw_text) spacy.displacy.render(text1,style="ent",jupyter=True)
## Output
NER using Spacy
Applications:
Some of the prominent applications of Named Entity Recognition are as follows:
Conclusion
Named Entity Recognition is one of the best ways for extracting information from unstructured data. The best way to start with NER is to use entity extraction APIs using a sophisticated text mining platform.