Named Entity Recognizer (NER)

I happened to come across this today:
http://nlp.stanford.edu/software/CRF-NER.shtml

Stanford NER (also known as CRFClassifier) is a Java implementation of a Named Entity Recognizer. Named Entity Recognition (NER) labels sequences of words in a text which are the names of things, such as person and company names, or gene and protein names. The software provides a general (arbitrary order) implementation of linear chain Conditional Random Field (CRF) sequence models, coupled with well-engineered feature extractors for Named Entity Recognition

 http://nlp.stanford.edu/software/jenny-ner-2007.pdf

Language-Independent Named Entity Recognition (II)

http://www.cnts.ua.ac.be/conll2003/ner/

"Named entities are phrases that contain the names of persons, organizations, locations, times and quantities."