Person Name Entity Recognition for Arabic

Named entity recognition (NER) is nowadays an important task, which is responsible for the identification of proper names in text and their classification as different types of named entity such as people, locations, and organizations. In this paper, we present our attempt at the recognition and extraction of the most important proper name entity, that is, the person name, for the Arabic language. We developed the system, Person Name Entity Recognition for Arabic (PERA), using a rule-based approach. The system consists of a lexicon, in the form of gazetteer name lists, and a grammar, in the form of regular expressions, which are responsible for recognizing person name entities. The PERA system is evaluated using a corpus that is tagged in a semi-automated way. The system performance results achieved were satisfactory and confirm to the targets set forth for the precision, recall, and f-measure.