Named entity annotation in practice: people, places and the grey areas
· a.pannella87
Last updated: 27 October 2026 · OpenJob editorial team
Named entity annotation means marking the spans of text that name a person, organisation, place, date or similar. Most cases are easy; the work is in the grey areas: span boundaries, words whose type depends on context, and entities nested inside others. Consistency within one project matters more than any personal convention.
Key points
- Tag by meaning in the sentence, not by the word alone.
- Span rules (titles, articles) differ between projects.
- Check whether the scheme allows nested entities.
- Native speakers are recruited because conventions differ by language.
Named entity recognition, or NER, is one of the oldest text annotation tasks: mark the spans of text that name a person, organisation, place, date and so on. Most of it is easy. The work is in the cases that are not.
Span boundaries
Do you tag “the University of Bologna” or “University of Bologna”? “Dr Rossi” or “Rossi”? Guides decide, and they are rarely the same across projects. Consistency inside one project matters far more than which convention you prefer.
Context decides the type
“Washington” can be a person, a city, a state or a government. “Apple” can be a company or fruit. Annotators tag by meaning in the sentence, not by the word. When the sentence does not settle it, the guide usually has a fallback rule; if it does not, flag the item.
Nested and overlapping entities
“Bank of Italy headquarters in Rome” contains an organisation and a place, and the organisation contains a country name. Some schemes allow nested tags, others only the outermost span. Check which before you start.
A ten-minute practice
Take a news article in your language and tag every person, organisation and place by hand. Then write down every decision you hesitated over. That list is exactly what a project guide is for, and reading one will feel familiar instead of overwhelming.
Why language matters here
Entity conventions differ by language: capitalisation in German, titles in Japanese, compound names in Spanish. That is one reason platforms recruit native speakers for text projects. See current native-speaker roles such as Spanish Language Expert and Portuguese Language Expert.
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Frequently asked questions
What is named entity recognition annotation?
It is marking spans of text that name specific things, such as people, organisations, places and dates, and assigning each a type. The annotated text trains models to recognise entities. Projects define their own categories and boundary rules in a guide you follow literally.
How do I handle a word that could be two entity types?
Decide by meaning in the sentence: Washington can be a person, a city, a state or a government. If the sentence does not settle it, use the guide’s fallback rule. If there is none, flag the item instead of guessing.
How can I practise entity annotation for free?
Take a news article in your language and tag every person, organisation and place by hand. Write down every decision you hesitated over. That list shows exactly what a project guide must answer, and makes real guides easier to absorb.