  This paper describes a new, freely available, highly multilingual named
entity resource for person and organisation names that has been compiled over
seven years of large-scale multilingual news analysis combined with Wikipedia
mining, resulting in 205,000 per-son and organisation names plus about the same
number of spelling variants written in over 20 different scripts and in many
more languages. This resource, produced as part of the Europe Media Monitor
activity (EMM, http://emm.newsbrief.eu/overview.html), can be used for a number
of purposes. These include improving name search in databases or on the
internet, seeding machine learning systems to learn named entity recognition
rules, improve machine translation results, and more. We describe here how this
resource was created; we give statistics on its current size; we address the
issue of morphological inflection; and we give details regarding its
functionality. Updates to this resource will be made available daily.
