  KnowNER is a multilingual Named Entity Recognition (NER) system that
leverages different degrees of external knowledge. A novel modular framework
divides the knowledge into four categories according to the depth of knowledge
they convey. Each category consists of a set of features automatically
generated from different information sources (such as a knowledge-base, a list
of names or document-specific semantic annotations) and is used to train a
conditional random field (CRF). Since those information sources are usually
multilingual, KnowNER can be easily trained for a wide range of languages. In
this paper, we show that the incorporation of deeper knowledge systematically
boosts accuracy and compare KnowNER with state-of-the-art NER approaches across
three languages (i.e., English, German and Spanish) performing amongst
state-of-the art systems in all of them.
