It is often claimed that Named Entity recognition systems need extensive gazetteers--lists of names of people, organisations, locations, and other named entities. Indeed, the compilation of such gazetteers is sometimes mentioned as a bottleneck in the design of Named Entity recognition systems. We report on a Named Entity recognition system which combines rule-based grammars with statistical (maximum entropy) models. We report on the system's performance with gazetteers of different types and different sizes, using test material from the MUC-7 competition. .
