Introduction to the CoNLL-2003 Shared Task: Language-Independent Named Entity Recognition

This paper introduces and documents the CoNLL-2003 shared task, which focused on language-independent named entity recognition. It presents background information on the task's two data sets, one for English and one for German, and describes the evaluation method used to score the task.

The paper then gives a general overview of the systems that took part in the shared task and discusses their performance. By defining shared English and German datasets together with a common evaluation method, it provided a standardized basis for comparing language-independent named entity recognition systems.