Language Independent Named Entity Classification by modified Transformation-based Learning and by Decision Tree Induction

We describe our last results at the CoNLL2002 shared task of Named Entity Recognition and Classification using two approaches that we first applied to other NLL problems. We have been developing our own modified TBL learner initially to tackle the Part-of-Speech tagging problem, for integration in a hybrid NLL and rule- based system for information extraction (Ciravegna et al., 1999). After encouraging results in applying decision tree induction to the CoNLL2001 task of chunking, Jones (2002), where we attained an overall F- measure of 92.90 at this task, we have applied the same set-up to the NER task.