Reuse of a Proper Noun Recognition System in Commercial and Operational NLP Applications

SRA's proprietary product, NameTag TM, which provides fast and accurate name recognition, has been reused in many ap- plications in recent and ongoing efforts, in- cluding multilingual information retrieval and browsing, text clustering, and assis- tance to manual text indexing. This paper reports on SRA's experience in embedding name recognition in these three specific ap- plications, and the mutual impacts that oc- cur, both on the algorithmic level and in the role that name recognition plays in user interaction with a system. In the course of this, we touch upon various interactions between proper name recognition and ma- chine translation (MT), as well as the role of accurate name recognition in improving the performance of word segmentation al- gorithms needed for languages whose writ- ing systems do not segment words.