Named entity recognition doesn't identify entities that are used as hashtags

[JamesFrost]

The named entity annotator fails to identify entities that are used as a hashtag.

For example I like Jeremy would correctly identify Jeremy as a named entity. However, I like #Jeremy would not.

Is this behaviour intended?

[J38]

The training data for the system was not trained on social media data, so it never saw an example where a # started an entity. I think you raise a good point that we need to think about improved handling of social media text.

[J38]

We could possibly add something that processes tokens that start with # and removes the # for the purpose of named entity recognition tagging.