Department of Computer, Control and Management Engineering

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is the task of identifying named entities in texts and classifying them through specific semantic categories, a process which is crucial for a wide range of NLP applications. Current datasets for NER focus mainly on coarse-grained entity types, tend to consider a single textual genre and to cover a narrow set of languages, thus limiting the general applicability of NER systems.In this work, we design a new methodology for automatically producing NER annotations, and address the aforementioned limitations by introducing a novel dataset that covers 10 languages, 15 NER categories and 2 textual genres.We also introduce a manually-annotated test set, and extensively evaluate the quality of our novel dataset on both this new test set and standard benchmarks for NER.In addition, in our dataset, we include: i) disambiguation information to enable the development of multilingual entity linking systems, and ii) image URLs to encourage the creation of multimodal systems. We release our dataset at https://github.com/Babelscape/multinerd.