A proposal to automatically build and maintain gazetteers for Named Entity Recognition by using Wikipedia

This paper describes a method to automatically create and maintain gazetteers for Named Entity Recognition (NER). This method extracts the necessary information from linguistic resources. Our approach is based on the analysis of an on-line encyclopedia entries by using a noun hierarchy and optionally a PoS tagger. An important motivation is to reach a high level of language independence. This restricts the techniques that can be used but makes the method useful for languages with few resources. The evaluation carried out proves that this approach can be successfully used to build NER gazetteers for location (F 78%) and person (F 68%) categories.