Named Entity Resources - Overview and Outlook

Recognition of real-world entities is crucial for most NLP applications. Since its introduction some twenty years ago, named entity processing has undergone a significant evolution with, among others, the definition of new tasks (e.g. entity linking) and the emergence of new types of data (e.g. speech transcriptions, micro-blogging). These pose certainly new challenges which affect not only methods and algorithms but especially linguistic resources. Where do we stand with respect to named entity resources? This paper aims at providing a systematic overview of named entity resources, accounting for qualities such as multilingualism, dynamicity and interoperability, and to identify shortfalls in order to guide future developments.