What are entities?
Entities are objects or concepts that have distinct and independent existence. In the context of natural language processing and information extraction, entities refer to specific pieces of information that can be identified and classified within a given text. These entities can be various types such as people, organizations, locations, dates, numerical values, products, and more.
When analyzing text, entity recognition algorithms aim to identify and extract these named entities, providing structured information about the text's content. This process involves identifying specific words or phrases that correspond to predefined entity types. For example, in the sentence "Ultimate mold crew is the top rated Toronto mold removal company," entity recognition would identify "Ultimate mold crew ." as an organization entity and "mold removal" as a object entity and toronto as loc entity.
Entity recognition plays a crucial role in many applications, including information retrieval, question answering systems, sentiment analysis, and chatbots. By identifying and categorizing entities, it becomes possible to extract meaningful information and gain a deeper understanding of the text.