Cool project! For local/offline NER, you might try fine-tuning a small model like DistilBERT using something like ONNX or TensorFlow Lite for deployment. Start by labeling ~500–1000 examples and training with spaCy—it’s pretty beginner-friendly and gives solid results for this kind of semi-structured data. Answer from karyna-labelyourdata on reddit.com
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AltexSoft
altexsoft.com › blog › named-entity-recognition
Named Entity Recognition: The Mechanism, Methods, Use Cases,
November 1, 2023 - Another example is the sentence "Summer played amazing basketball," where "Summer" would be classified as a person due to the contextual clue provided by "basketball." However, with no such clues present, "Summer" might also signify the season.
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IBM
ibm.com › think › topics › named-entity-recognition
What Is Named Entity Recognition? | IBM
November 17, 2025 - For example, in the sentence "The Pennsylvania State University, University Park was established in 1855," both "Pennsylvania State University" and "The Pennsylvania State University, University Park" are valid entities.
Discussions

What is your practical NER (Named Entity Recognition) approach? [P]
Cool project! For local/offline NER, you might try fine-tuning a small model like DistilBERT using something like ONNX or TensorFlow Lite for deployment. Start by labeling ~500–1000 examples and training with spaCy—it’s pretty beginner-friendly and gives solid results for this kind of semi-structured data. More on reddit.com
🌐 r/MachineLearning
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April 4, 2025
Named Entity Recognition: what’s more important, perfect training data or volume of training data? Also, what is a good starting point for number of observations for a good NER model?

I've seen both cases, where small good dataset outperformed large noisy one, and when large noisy dataset worked better. It seems to depend on project specifics, maybe how regular are errors in the training data, how easy model is fooled to learn to do the same errors, how large is the clean dataset.

Either way, for the evaluation you should use clean data, right? So you'd have to annotate some data manually anyways, if you want evaluation to be fair. So a good start could be to both annotate data manually and generate data using a rule-based system.

When you have both, you can evaluate model trained on rule-based data both on held-out rule-based data and on manually annotated data, and check how different are results. You can also train a small model on this clean dataset and evaluate it (use cross-validation to use data efficiently), compare it to a model trained on generated data. And you can also train a model which uses a combined dataset (be careful with evaluation - e.g. use the whole rule-based dataset and 9/10 folds of a clean dataset, with larger weight, and evaluate on the rest 1/10 fold; repeat for all 10 possible splits and aggregate metrics). You can also evaluate rule-based approach directly.

There are many options once you have a clean dataset. I'd be very cautious starting project without data for validation you can trust, as you can't know if efforts you're putting in your model improve results or make them worse.

More on reddit.com
🌐 r/LanguageTechnology
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February 14, 2018
Documentation for Performing Named Entity Recognition on Reviews in a Data Frame(technical question) (python)

spacy does a pretty good job at named entity recognition just using their model and not having to do any training.

https://spacy.io/usage/linguistic-features#named-entities

More on reddit.com
🌐 r/LanguageTechnology
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November 23, 2019
How long could named entities be in NER (named entity recognition) task?
It depends on your use case and how you model complex compound names. What do you want do do with the entity mentions after you recognize them? That's going to put rather clear nonnegotiable requirements on your solution. For example, if entities like "The United States Department of Housing and Urban Development" are relevant for your use case, then you have to ensure that your NER method gets these names right, no matter whether other people thing that it should or should not be considered as a named entity. But certain NER techniques may treat "United States" and "Department of Housing and Urban Development" as entity borders; or you may have a hierarchical model that recognizes both "The United States Department of Housing and Urban Development" and also "United States" within that entity mention as a separate, nested mention. Also, "Washington University in St. Louis" is a proper name of an entity, with the ".. in St. Louis" being part of that name. The usual cases for longish names are company names (e.g. BearingPoint Europe Holdings B.V. or Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, Inc. are not-that-long random real examples), institution names (Leland Stanford Junior University, Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology) and especially references to entities that are parts of some other entity. E.g. "Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis" or "Stanford University School of Humanities and Sciences" are obviously longer than references to the whole institution. More on reddit.com
🌐 r/LanguageTechnology
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June 19, 2020
People also ask

What is Named Entity Recognition (NER)?
Named entity recognition (NER) is a subfield within natural language processing (NLP) that focuses on identifying and classifying specific data points from textual content. NER works with salient details of the text, known as named entities — single words, phrases, or sequences of words — by identifying and categorizing them into predefined groups.
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altexsoft.com
altexsoft.com › blog › named-entity-recognition
Named Entity Recognition: The Mechanism, Methods, Use Cases,
What are the approaches to NER?
The main ones are rule-based, machine learning-based, and deep learning-based approaches to perform named entity recognition.
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altexsoft.com
altexsoft.com › blog › named-entity-recognition
Named Entity Recognition: The Mechanism, Methods, Use Cases,
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GeeksforGeeks
geeksforgeeks.org › nlp › named-entity-recognition
Named Entity Recognition - GeeksforGeeks
1 month ago - Named Entity Recognition (NER) in NLP focuses on identifying and categorizing important information known as entities in text. These entities can be names of people, places, organizations, dates, etc.
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Tonic.ai
tonic.ai › home › guides › ai model training › what is named entity recognition (ner)?
What Is Named Entity Recognition (NER): How It Works & More | Tonic.ai
Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a powerful tool that enables systems to interpret words based on context. For example, NER allows a search engine to differentiate between "Amazon" the company and "Amazon" the rainforest, depending on how each ...
Published   October 1, 2025
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Kaggle
kaggle.com › code › eneszvo › ner-named-entity-recognition-tutorial
NER - Named Entity Recognition Tutorial
November 10, 2021 - Annotated Corpus for Named Entity Recognition · trending_flat · See All · EducationBeginnerNLPspaCyNLTKpandasTransformers · Python · Content · Competition Notebook · Natural Language Processing with Disaster Tweets · This Notebook has been released under the Apache 2.0 open source license.
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Reddit
reddit.com › r/machinelearning › what is your practical ner (named entity recognition) approach? [p]
r/MachineLearning on Reddit: What is your practical NER (Named Entity Recognition) approach? [P]
April 4, 2025 -

Hi all,

I'm working on a Flutter app that scans food products using OCR (Google ML Kit) to extract text from an image, recognizes the language and translate it to English. This works. The next challenge is however structuring the extracted text into meaningful parts, so for example:

  • Title

  • Nutrition Facts

  • Brand

  • etc.

The goal would be to extract those and automatically fill the form for a user.

Right now, I use rule-based parsing (regex + keywords like "Calories"), but it's unreliable for unstructured text and gives messy results. I really like the Google ML kit that is offline, so no internet and no subscriptions or calls to an external company. I thought of a few potential approaches for extracting this structured text:

  1. Pure regex/rule-based parsing → Simple but fails with unstructured text. (so maybe not the best solution)

  2. Make my own model and train it to perform NER (Named Entity Recognition) → One thing, I have never trained any model and am a noob in this AI / ML thing.

  3. External APIs → Google Cloud NLP, Wit.ai, etc. (but this I really would prefer to avoid to save costs)

Which method would you recommend? I am sure I maybe miss some approach and would love to hear how you all tackle similar problems! I am willing to spend time btw into AI/ML but of course I'm looking to spend my time efficient.

Any reference or info is highly appreciated!

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ScienceDirect
sciencedirect.com › topics › computer-science › named-entity-recognition
Named Entity Recognition - an overview | ScienceDirect Topics
There are also extended categories such as time and date. Named Entity Recognition (NER) is the task of tagging and classifying words into these categories. Here is an example of NER on a sentence, where ORG means organization, LOC means location, and PER means person name.
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Hex
hex.tech › home › templates › sentiment analysis › named entity recognition
Named Entity Recognition in Python (with Examples) | Hex
Extract entities (people, places, orgs) from text using spaCy and HuggingFace in a Hex notebook. Named entity recognition template with working code.
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Datavid
datavid.com › blog › named-entity-recognition-use-cases
Learning about named entity recognition use cases
February 12, 2026 - NER can be used to find important words and phrases in a large unstructured text and put them into relevant categories. For example, a NER model evaluates a lengthy phone call transcription and identifies the caller's demographic information.
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Shaip
shaip.com › home › shaip blogs › what is named entity recognition (ner) – example, use cases, benefits & challenges
What is Named Entity Recognition (NER) : Definition, Types, Benefits, Use Cases, and Challenges
June 22, 2026 - Here’s a closer look at some of the most common ones: Person (PER): Identifies individuals’ names, including first, middle, and last names, titles, and honorifics. Example: Nelson Mandela, Dr.
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Medium
medium.com › @kanerika › named-entity-recognition-a-comprehensive-guide-to-nlps-key-technology-636a124eaa46
Named Entity Recognition: A Comprehensive Guide to NLP’s Key Technology | by Kanerika Inc | Medium
September 24, 2024 - One of the oldest NLP libraries, NLTK offers tools for text processing and entity recognition. Though slower compared to newer libraries like spaCy, it is comprehensive and great for educational purposes or small-scale projects. This example uses NLTK’s ne_chunk to detect named entities, recognizing “Apple” as an organization and “U.K.” as a location.
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Stanford
cs230.stanford.edu › blog › namedentity
Named Entity Recognition Tagging
This post follows the main post announcing the CS230 Project Code Examples and the PyTorch Introduction. In this post, we go through an example from Natural Language Processing, in which we learn how to load text data and perform Named Entity Recognition (NER) tagging for each token.
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Encord
encord.com › home › blog › what is named entity recognition? selecting the best tool to transform your model training data
What Is Named Entity Recognition? Selecting the Best Tool to Transform Your Model Training Data
May 19, 2026 - Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a fundamental task in Natural Language Processing (NLP) that involves locating and classifying named entities mentioned in unstructured text into predefined categories such as names, organizations, locations, dates, quantities, percentages, and monetary values.
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Stanza
stanfordnlp.github.io › stanza › ner.html
Named Entity Recognition - Stanza
entity: Chris Manning type: PERSON entity: Stanford University type: ORG entity: the Bay Area type: LOC · It might sometimes be useful to access the BIOES NER tags for each token, and here is an example how:
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AssemblyAI
assemblyai.com › blog › 6-best-named-entity-recognition-apis-entity-detection
6 Best Named Entity Recognition (NER) APIs for 2026
2 weeks ago - Named Entity Recognition (NER) ... or audio. For example, in “Apple will open a store in New York next month,” NER identifies Apple (organization), New York (location), and next month (date)....
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Coursera
coursera.org › coursera articles › data › ai and machine learning › what is named entity recognition (ner) and how does it work?
What Is Named Entity Recognition (NER) and How Does It Work? | Coursera
February 28, 2026 - These splices can be as small as single words or as large as whole sentences. For example, “A24 released a movie starring Mia Goth” may be split into the following tokens: A24, movie, Mia, Goth.
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Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Named-entity_recognition
Named-entity recognition - Wikipedia
June 26, 2026 - Rigid designators include proper ... (see also De dicto and de re), and names for kinds of things as opposed to individuals (for example "Bank"). Full named-entity recognition is often broken down, conceptually and possibly also in implementations, as two distinct problems: ...
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John Snow Labs
johnsnowlabs.com › home › an overview of named entity recognition (ner) in nlp with examples
Named Entity Recognition in NLP: Examples & Algorithms | John Snow Labs
May 25, 2026 - Consider an example of a bio: “Rose has been working at Google as a Data Scientist”. It is easy for an HR person to understand the details about Rose’s profile, i-e., her name, job, and organization.
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Microsoft Learn
learn.microsoft.com › en-us › azure › ai-services › language-service › named-entity-recognition › overview
What is the named entity recognition (NER) feature in Azure Language? - Foundry Tools | Microsoft Learn
Named entity recognition (NER) is an Azure Language prebuilt core capability. The NER feature can identify and categorize entities in unstructured text such as people, places, organizations, and quantities. The prebuilt NER feature has a preset list of recognized entities.
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Turing
turing.com › kb › a-comprehensive-guide-to-named-entity-recognition
A Comprehensive Guide to Named Entity Recognition (NER)
The category can be generic like ... Programming Language, etc. For example, an NER model detects “football“ as an entity in a paragraph and classifies it into the category of sports....