A biological named entity recognizer.

In this paper we describe a new named entity extraction system. Our system is based on a manually developed set of rules that rely heavily upon some crucial lexical information, linguistic constraints of English, and contextual information. This system achieves state of art results in the protein name detection task, which is what many of the current name extraction systems do. We discuss the need for detection of chemical names and show that we not only obtain a high degree of success in recognizing chemicals but that this task can help improve the precision of protein name detection as well. We use context and surrounding words for categorization of named entities and find the results obtained are encouraging.