The Perl Toolchain Summit needs more sponsors. If your company depends on Perl, please support this very important event.

NAME

Lingua::EN::NamedEntity - Basic Named Entity Extraction algorithm

SYNOPSIS

  use Lingua::EN::NamedEntity;
  my @entities = extract_entities($some_text);

DESCRIPTION

"Named entities" is the NLP jargon for proper nouns which represent people, places, organisations, and so on. This module provides a very simple way of extracting these from a text. If we run the extract_entities routine on a piece of news coverage of recent UK political events, we should expect to see it return a list of hash references looking like this:

  { entity => 'Mr Howard', class => 'person', scores => { ... }, },
  { entity => 'Ministry of Defence', class => 'organisation', ... },
  { entity => 'Oxfordshire', class => 'place', ... },

The additional scores hash reference in there breaks down the various possible classes for this entity in an open-ended scale.

The hash also includes the number of occurrences for that entity.

Naturally, the more text you throw at this, the more accurate it becomes.

extract_entities

Pass to <extract_entities> a text, and it will return a list of entities, as described above.

AUTHOR

Simon Cozens, simon@kasei.com

Maintained by Alberto Simões, ambs@cpan.org

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to Jon Allen for help with Makefile.PL failure.

Thanks to Bo Adler for a patch with entity count.

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

Copyright 2004-2008 by Alberto Simões Copyright 2003 by Simon Cozens

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.