Arabic named entity recognition—a survey and analysis

Abstract

As Arabic digital data has been increasing in abundance; the need for processing this information is growing. Named entity recognition (NER) is an information extraction technique that is vital to the processes of natural language processing (NLP). The ambiguous characteristics of the Arabic language make tasks related to NER and NLP very challenging. In addition to that, work related to Arabic NER is rather limited and under-studied. In this study, we survey previous works and methodologies and provide an analysis and discussion on the feature sets used, evaluation tools and advantages and disadvantages of each technique.