How to use Named Entity Recognition (NER)
The NER feature can evaluate unstructured text, and extract named entities from text in several predefined categories, for example: person, location, event, product, and organization.
Development options
To use named entity recognition, you submit raw unstructured text for analysis and handle the API output in your application. Analysis is performed as-is, with no additional customization to the model used on your data. There are two ways to use named entity recognition:
| Development option | Description |
|---|---|
| Language studio | Language Studio is a web-based platform that lets you try entity linking with text examples without an Azure account, and your own data when you sign up. For more information, see the Language Studio website or language studio quickstart. |
| REST API or Client library (Azure SDK) | Integrate named entity recognition into your applications using the REST API, or the client library available in a variety of languages. For more information, see the named entity recognition quickstart. |
Determine how to process the data (optional)
Input languages
When you submit documents to be processed, you can specify which of the supported languages they're written in. if you don't specify a language, key phrase extraction defaults to English. The API may return offsets in the response to support different multilingual and emoji encodings.
Submitting data
Analysis is performed upon receipt of the request. Using the NER feature synchronously is stateless. No data is stored in your account, and results are returned immediately in the response.
When using this feature asynchronously, the API results are available for 24 hours from the time the request was ingested, and is indicated in the response. After this time period, the results are purged and are no longer available for retrieval.
The API attempts to detect the defined entity categories for a given document language.
Getting NER results
When you get results from NER, you can stream the results to an application or save the output to a file on the local system. The API response will include recognized entities, including their categories and subcategories, and confidence scores.
Service and data limits
For information on the size and number of requests you can send per minute and second, see the service limits article.