An Automatically Generated Annotated Corpus for Albanian Named Entity Recognition

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is an important task in many NLP pipelines. It has become especially important for knowledge bases that power many of the nowadays information retrieval systems. In order to cope with the high demand for annotated training corpora for supervised NER systems, automatic generation approaches have been proposed. In this paper we report on the first automatically generated NE annotated corpus for Albanian. News articles from Albanian news media were used as a document source. They were automatically tagged using a custom generated gazetteer from the Albanian Wikipedia. Our evaluation results show that this corpus can be used as a baseline corpus for human annotated ones or as a training corpus where no other is available.