Why Named Entity Recognition?
With the enormous quantity of data available via the internet and other electronic sources it is no longer feasible for human beings to process this data to identify useful information. Computers are now necessary for finding this information, and Named Entity recognition plays a significant part.
Not only are named entities useful for identifying where a piece of information may be located (i.e. a description of a person may be found in text near his or her name), but a named entity itself may be the answer to a particular question. For this reaseon named entity recognition is particularly useful in Question Answering.