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An Empirical Study of the Occurrence and Co-Occurrence of Named Entities in Natural Language Corpora

Named Entities (NEs) that occur in natural language text are important especially due to the advent of social media, and they play a critical role in the development of many natural language technologies. In this paper, we systematically analyze the patterns of occurrence and co-occurrence of NEs in standard large English news corpora - providing valuable insight for the understanding of the corpus, and subsequently paving way for the development of technologies that rely critically on handling NEs. We use two distinctive approaches: normal statistical analysis that measure and report the occurrence patterns of NEs in terms of frequency, growth, etc., and a complex networks based analysis that measures the co-occurrence pattern in terms of connectivity, degree-distribution, small-world phenomenon, etc. Our analysis indicates that: (i) NEs form an open-set in corpora and grow linearly, (ii) presence of a kernel and peripheral NE's, with the large periphery occurring rarely, and (iii) a strong evidence of small-world phenomenon. Our findings may suggest effective ways for construction of NE lexicons to aid efficient development of several natural language technologies.