Stanford Named Entity Recognizer (NER)
Please cite the following paper for the model and software:
Jenny Rose Finkel, Trond Grenager, and Christopher Manning. 2005. Incorporating Non-local Information into Information Extraction Systems by Gibbs Sampling. Proceedings of the 43nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2005), pp. 363-370. http://nlp.stanford.edu/~manning/papers/gibbscrf3.pdf
Stanford NER is a Java implementation of a Named Entity Recognizer. Named Entity Recognition (NER) labels sequences of words in a text which are the names of things, such as person and company names, or gene and protein names. It comes with well-engineered feature extractors for Named Entity Recognition, and many options for defining feature extractors. Included with the download are good named entity recognizers for English, particularly for the 3 classes (PERSON, ORGANIZATION, LOCATION), and we also make available on this page various other models for different languages and circumstances, including models trained on just the CoNLL 2003 English training data.
Stanford NER is also known as CRFClassifier. The software provides a general implementation of (arbitrary order) linear chain Conditional Random Field (CRF) sequence models. That is, by training your own models on labeled data, you can actually use this code to build sequence models for NER or any other task. (CRF models were pioneered by Lafferty, McCallum, and Pereira (2001); see Sutton and McCallum (2006) or Sutton and McCallum (2010) for more comprehensible introductions.)
The original CRF code is by Jenny Finkel. The feature extractors are by Dan Klein, Christopher Manning, and Jenny Finkel. Much of the documentation and usability is due to Anna Rafferty. More recent code development has been done by various Stanford NLP Group members.
Stanford NER is available for download, licensed under the GNU General Public License (v2 or later). Source is included. The package includes components for command-line invocation (look at the shell scripts and batch files included in the download), running as a server (look at NERServer in the sources jar file), and a Java API (look at the simple examples in the NERDemo.java file included in the download, and then at the javadocs). Stanford NER code is dual licensed (in a similar manner to MySQL, etc.). Open source licensing is under the full GPL, which allows many free uses. For distributors of proprietary software, commercial licensing is available. If you don't need a commercial license, but would like to support maintenance of these tools, we welcome gifts.
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