Which NLP task involves identifying and classifying named entities such as persons, organizations, locations, and dates within text?

• A. Named Entity Recognition
• B. Part-of-Speech tagging
• C. Text classification
• D. Sentiment analysis

Answer: (A)

Identifying and labeling real-world mentions in text with categories like person, organization, location, and date is what Named Entity Recognition does. It goes beyond spotting words to identify multiword names and assigns them their entity type, turning free text into structured data you can search or analyze. This is different from Part-of-Speech tagging, which only marks grammatical roles for individual words and doesn’t generally tag whole entity spans; and from Text classification, which assigns a single label to an entire document rather than identifying who or what is mentioned; or from Sentiment analysis, which focuses on the overall feeling rather than entity recognition. For example, in “Alice founded Acme Corp in Paris on Jan 5, 2020,” Named Entity Recognition would identify Alice as a person, Acme Corp as an organization, Paris as a location, and Jan 5, 2020 as a date.