Towards automatic recognition of product names: an exploratory study of brand names in economic texts

This paper describes the first stage of research towards automatic recognition of brand names (trademarks, product names and service names) in Swedish economic texts. The findings of an exploratory study of brand names in economic texts by Malmgren (2004) are summarized, and the work of compiling a corpus annotated with named entities based on these findings is described. A Named Entity Recognition experiment using transformationbased learning on this data shows that what is problematic to the annotator is difficult also to the recognizer; company names and brand names are closely connected and thus hard to disambiguate.