Extracting person names from Arabic newspapers

Named Entity recognition is very new in the Arabic Language although it has reached the maturity stage for some other languages such as English and French. In this paper, we describe the development and implementation of a person name named entity recognition system for the Arabic Language. We use heuristics based on a set of keywords rather than complex grammars, statistical and machine learning techniques. However, the results obtained are of the same standards or better in some cases as those systems that are using more sophisticated approaches.