What does named entity recognition (NER) help with?

Named entity recognition (NER) is a sub-task of natural language processing that focuses on identifying and classifying named entities within a text. These named entities could include names of people, organizations, locations, dates, quantities, and other specific items that stand out from the rest of the textual data. The primary goal of NER is to extract these entities and categorize them into predefined classes.

This process is crucial in various applications, such as information retrieval, content classification, and enhancing search functionalities, as it helps in organizing and understanding the context of the information contained within large datasets. By effectively identifying and classifying named entities, businesses and organizations can better analyze unstructured data and derive insights that drive decision-making processes.

The other options do not align with the primary function of NER. Measuring numerical data relates to quantitative analysis rather than entity recognition, tagging parts of speech involves grammatical categorization that NER does not focus on, and sentiment analysis is concerned with the emotional tone of text, which is different from identifying named entities.