Named entity recognition (NER) is a widely applicable natural language processing task and building block of question answering, topic modeling, information retrieval, etc. In the medical domain, NER plays crucial role by extracting meaningful chunks from clinical notes reports, which are then fed to downstream tasks like assertion status detection, resolution, relation extraction, de-identific...

This paper describes the University of Sheffield’s entry in the 2010 TAC KBP entity linking and slot filling tasks. This was our first participation in the TAC KBP track. Given limited human resources and a relatively late decision to participate 1, we chose to view our participation as an exploratory effort, aimed at educating us in the issues surrounding the tasks. With that perspective we de...