Proper Name Extraction from Non-Journalistic Texts

This paper discusses the influence of the corpus on the automatic identification of proper names in texts. Techniques developed for the newswire genre are generally not sufficient to deal with larger corpora containing texts that do not follow strict writing constraints (for example, e-mail messages, transcriptions of oral conversations, etc). After a brief review of the research performed on news texts, we present some of the problems involved in the analysis of two different corpora: e-mails and hand-transcribed telephone conversations. Once the sources of errors have been presented, we then describe an approach to adapt a proper name extraction system developed for newspaper texts to the analysis of e-mail