NE recognition without training data on a language you don't speak

Abstract

In this paper we describe an experiment to adapt a named entity recognition system from English to Cebuano as part of the TIDES sur¬prise language program. With 4 person-days of effort, and with no previous knowledge of which language would be involved, no knowledge of the language in question once it was announced, and no training data available, we adapted the ANNIE system for Cebuano and achieved an F- measure of 77.5%.