Introducing NER
We opened this chapter with a tagger, and we'll see another very handy tagger—the NER tagger of spaCy. As NER's name suggests, we are interested in finding named entities.
What is a named entity? A named entity is a real-world object that we can refer to by a proper name or a quantity of interest. It can be a person, a place (city, country, landmark, famous building), an organization, a company, a product, dates, times, percentages, monetary amounts, a drug, or a disease name. Some examples are Alicia Keys, Paris, France, Brandenburg Gate, WHO, Google, Porsche Cayenne, and so on.
A named entity always points to a specific object, and that object is distinguishable via the corresponding named entity. For instance, if we tag the sentence Paris is the capital of France, we parse Paris and France as named entities, but not the word capital. The reason is that capital does not point to a specific object; it's a general name for many objects.
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