•What is NER? In information extraction, NER is a task consisting of identifying and classifying Named Entities in a text.
•What are NEs? Named Entities are all the ‘things’ such as persons, places, organizations, works of art etc. that are referenced through a stable designator, typically a proper name.
•What for? E.g.: retrieve and analyse all the persons mentioned in a text or a collection of texts; to grasp the general content of a text; analyse the relations between different types of entities, etc.
•How? NE annotation can be performed manually or (semi-) automatically (Named Entity Recognition).