What is NER (named entity recognition)?

Named entity recognition (NER) is used in AI chatbots to identify and classify a user’s words into predefined categories.

NER is a subtask of natural language processing (NLP); NER seeks to locate and classify the words used by a user into predefined categories, such as a person’s name, location, organization, contact details, and so on. This information can then be carried onto downstream tasks, deeper into the chatbot’s conditional decision flow. NLP focuses on analyzing and processing natural language.

Head to our documentation page to learn how NER-enabled intents work in our chatbot-building platform, Answers.