Named Entity Recognition for Digitised Historical Texts

We describe and evaluate a prototype system for recognising person and place names in digitised records of British parliamentary proceedings from the late 17th and early 19th centuries. The output of an OCR engine is the input for our system and we describe certain issues and errors in this data and discuss the methods we have used to overcome the problems. We describe our rule-based named entity recognition system for person and place names which is implemented using the LT-XML2 and LT-TTT2 text processing tools. We discuss the annotation of a development and testing corpus and provide results of an evaluation of our system on the test corpus.