An Adaptive Framework for Named Entity Combination

We have developed a new OSGi-based platform for Named Entity Recognition (NER) which uses a voting strategy to combine the results produced by several existing NER systems (currently OpenNLP, LingPipe and Stanford). The different NER systems have been systematically decomposed and modularized into the same pipeline of preprocessing components in order to support a flexible selection and ordering of the NER processing flow. This high modular and component-based design supports the possibility to setup different constellations of chained processing steps including alternative voting strategies for combining the results of parallel running components.