# On the Use of Parsing for Named Entity Recognition
## 2 Named Entity Recognition
### Shared Tasks and Data Sets for NER  
Since its inception, the NER task has been characterized by the gradual development of collaborative annotated resources that were materialized mainly through the organization of _shared tasks_. In these competitive evaluation workshops, the organizers provide annotated data sets for training in advance, which are used by participating teams from all over the world to fine-tune their systems. Later, test data sets are released for a limited period of time before the official results are provided by the participants. After a shared task has finished, these data sets are used to evaluate emerging new systems, thus enabling comparison between systems. A list of the most relevant shared tasks on NER follows:  
* MUC-6 ([[https://cs.nyu.edu/cs/faculty/grishman/muc6.html](https://cs.nyu.edu/cs/faculty/grishman/muc6.html)]([https://cs.nyu.edu/cs/faculty/grishman/muc6.html](https://cs.nyu.edu/cs/faculty/grishman/muc6.html))), the Sixth Message Understanding Conference, held in 1995 [1; 61]. Its data set consists of news from the _Wall Street Journal_. * MUC-7 ([[https://www-nlpir.nist.gov/related_projects/muc/index.html](https://www-nlpir.nist.gov/related_projects/muc/index.html)]([https://www-nlpir.nist.gov/related_projects/muc/index.html](https://www-nlpir.nist.gov/related_projects/muc/index.html))), the Seventh Message Understanding Conference, held in 1998 [62]. This time the data set consists of news from the _New York Times_. * SemEval ([[https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/venues/semeval/](https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/venues/semeval/)]([https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/venues/semeval/](https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/venues/semeval/))), the series of International Workshops on Semantic Evaluation, an evolution of the Evaluation exercises for Word Sense Disambiguation (SensEval), has held shared tasks since 1998 [63] on text mining in several languages. Usually, some of the tasks proposed each year involve the use of NER. * IREX ([[https://nlp.cs.nyu.edu/irex/index-e.html](https://nlp.cs.nyu.edu/irex/index-e.html)]([https://nlp.cs.nyu.edu/irex/index-e.html](https://nlp.cs.nyu.edu/irex/index-e.html))), an information retrieval and information extraction contest for the Japanese language [64]. The CRL NE, IREX General, and WEB NE Japanese data sets are derived from IREX. * CoNLL-2002 Shared task on Language-Independent Named Entity Recognition ([[https://www.clips.uantwerpen.be/conll2002/ner/](https://www.clips.uantwerpen.be/conll2002/ner/)]([https://www.clips.uantwerpen.be/conll2002/ner/](https://www.clips.uantwerpen.be/conll2002/ner/))) [65]. The Spanish data are a collection of newswire articles made available by the Spanish EFE News Agency. The Dutch data set consists of four editions of the Belgian newspaper _De Mogen_. * CoNLL-2003 Shared Task on Language-Independent Named Entity Recognition ([[https://www.clips.uantwerpen.be/conll2003/ner/](https://www.clips.uantwerpen.be/conll2003/ner/)]([https://www.clips.uantwerpen.be/conll2003/ner/](https://www.clips.uantwerpen.be/conll2003/ner/))) [66]. The data sets consist of Reuters news stories in English and _Frankfurter Rundshau_ news in German. * ACE ([[https://www.ldc.upenn.edu/collaborations/past-projects/ace](https://www.ldc.upenn.edu/collaborations/past-projects/ace)]([https://www.ldc.upenn.edu/collaborations/past-projects/ace](https://www.ldc.upenn.edu/collaborations/past-projects/ace))), the Automatic Content Extraction events, held from 1999 to 2008 [67]. Throughout these years, their datasets covered languages such as English, Spanish, Arabic, and Chinese. * BioCreAtlvE ([[https://biocreative.bioinformatics.udel.edu/](https://biocreative.bioinformatics.udel.edu/)]([https://biocreative.bioinformatics.udel.edu/](https://biocreative.bioinformatics.udel.edu/))), Critical Assessment of Information Extraction systems in Biology. This series of shared tasks started in 2004 [68] in order to develop a community-wide effort for evaluating text mining and information extraction systems applied to the biological domain.