A gazetteer is a collection of lists that contain the names of things such as cities, organizations, days of the week, and so on. Certain lists are used to look for instances of these names in text, such as for named entity recognition. As a result, it is effectively a lookup. There are many tools that use gazetteers as a source for information about names found in text. Gazetteers can be created using any number of different methods. Some common techniques include: hand creation by an expert human editor, automated extraction from other resources (such as web pages), and software package features. Each method has its advantages and disadvantages. For example, hand-created gazetteers are highly accurate but require a lot of labor and can be difficult or impossible to update automatically. Automated extraction uses technology to scan documents for certain terms and then create lists based on how often those terms appear together. This process can be done manually or with software. Gazetteers created with software tend to be more comprehensive than those created manually but may not identify all possible names found in text. Gazetteers can also be used for more than just name finding. For example, one might want to know what companies are mentioned in a newspaper article or what people are quoted as saying in a biography. These types of analyses require more than just names; they also need context—that is, where each name appears within the document.