How to define person's names in text (Java)

I have some input text, which contains one or more human person names. I do not have any dictionary for these names. Which Java library can help me to define names from my input text? I looked through OpenNLP, but did not find any example or guide or at least description of how it can be applied into my code. (I saw javadoc, but it is pretty poor documentation for such a project.)

I want to find names from some random text. If the input text is "My friend Joe Smith went开发者_开发百科 to the store.", then I want to get "Joe Smith". I think there should be some large enough dictionaries on smart engines, based on smaller dictionaries, that can understand human names.

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I'd look into LingPipe. Check out this demo. By the way, what you are trying to do is called "named entity recognition". It's a difficult CS problem to get right.

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OpenNLP has Named Entity recognition. Check the section English Name Finding in the docs. But my experience suggests, it identifies entities but there are no tags associated with it. (To be precise, I found the tags to ambiguously assigned.) So, if you have the sentence "My friend Joe Smith went to the Walmart store", OpenNLP identifies two named entities - "Joe Smith" and "Walmart". I couldn't get it tag "Joe Smith" as Person and "Walmart" as Organization.

As suggested by Matt, you can try LingPipe, though it's a commercial tool. Some of the open source alternatives are MorphAdorner and Stanford NER.

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While we're waiting for details on what you're doing, here are a couple of links to lists of common first names, at least in the USA demographic:

• http://names.mongabay.com/male_names_alpha.htm
• http://names.mongabay.com/female_names.htm

I think you'll need these (and/or more) to check against, as your task doesn't sound like something a NLP can do for you without reference information.

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You can check Person extraction from free text here http://code.google.com/p/graph-expression/wiki/Examples

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OpenNlp has a person type in their NER model. download the project and models from the opennlp web site, and get the models from the models website (there is a link on the Opennlp page). Then go here, http://www.asksunny.com/drupal/?q=node/4 it is a good example of how to load the models and perform NER. NER is never perfect, so don't be dissapointed.

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I would suggest you using stanford Name Entity Recognizer(NER). Stanford NER provides many classifiers.One of the classifiers provided by stanford NER can identify name,location and organization from a given text.

You can find an online demo for stanford NER in this link http://nlp.stanford.edu:8080/ner/

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You can also look through OpenCyc and WordNet projects as more interesting from semantic view point.

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This problem is addressed in named entity recognition in natural language processing and at the moment it is considered to be a bit hard problem. However there are many tools you can use for that. I have used stanford NER for this and it is a good software.

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OpenCalais service may be useful. Try their submission tool at: http://www.opencalais.com/documentation/calais-submission-tool

This tool recognizes much more than just person names.

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Try Stanford NER, a text processing library

http://nlp.stanford.edu:8080/ner/