Semantic and syntactic patterns of multiword names: A cross-language study

Named entities (NEs) constitute a great challenge for computational linguistics and
one of the major research topics during the last decade. They can be divided in cat-
egories describing people, location, time, organization and others. In this paper
we will restrict our discussion to proper names that belong to three main classes:
personal, location and organization names, and that can be either single-word
nouns or multiword expressions. First, we are going to define common (language-
independent) semantic patterns for proper names and then we will present the cor

responding syntactic patterns in English, Bulgarian, French, Greek, and Serbian.
We will compare these patterns regarding grammatical categories of dependent
constituents, definiteness, distribution of clitics, word order and various alterna-
tions. Our ultimate goal is to build a universal framework for Named Entity Recog-
nition (NER).