Towards Generalizable Place Name Recognition Systems: Analysis and Enhancement of NER Systems on English News from India

Place name recognition is one of the key tasks in Information Extraction. In this paper, we tackle this task in English News from India. We first analyze the results obtained by using available tools and corpora and then train our own models to obtain better results. Most of the previous work done on entity recognition for English makes use of similar corpora for both training and testing. Yet we observe that the performance drops significantly when we test the models on different datasets. For this reason, we have trained various models using combinations of several corpora. Our results show that training models using combinations of several corpora improves the relative performance of these models but still more research on this area is necessary to obtain place name recognizers that generalize to any given dataset.