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Technical GlossaryNatural Language Processing

Nested NER

A more complex NER problem in which one entity span can contain another entity span.

Nested NER becomes important in real-world texts where the assumption of flat spans is insufficient. For example, an organization name may contain a location or person name inside it. Such structures are common in legal, biomedical, and news data. Because they are difficult to capture with flat tagging schemes, they require more advanced span-modeling approaches.