Extracting location names from unstructured Italian texts using grammar rules and MapReduce

Abstract

Named entity recognition aims at locating elements in a given text and classifying them according to pre-defined categories, such as the names of persons, organisations, locations, quantities, etc. This paper proposes an approach to recognise the location names by extracting them from unstructured Italian language texts. We put forward the use of the framework MapReduce for this task, since it is more robust than a classical analysis when data are unknown and assists at parallelising processing, which is essential for a large amount of data.