Named Entity Recognition in Greek Texts with an Ensemble of SVMs and Active Learning

We present a freely available named-entity recognizer for Greek texts that identifies temporal expressions, person, and organization names. For temporal expressions, it relies on semi-automatically produced patterns. For person and organization names, it employs an ensemble of Support Vector Machines that scan the input text in two passes. The ensemble is trained using active learning, whereby the system itself proposes candidate training instances to be annotated by a human during training. The recognizer was evaluated on both a general collection of newspaper articles and a more focussed, in terms of topics, collection of financial articles.