Complex named entities in Spanish texts: Structures and properties

We present a linguistic analysis of Named Entities in Spanish texts. Our work is focused on the determination of the structure of complex proper names: names with coordinated constituents, names with prepositional phrases and names formed by several content words initialized by a capital letter. We present the analysis of circa 49,000 examples obtained from Mexican newspapers. We detailed their structure and give some notions about the context surrounding them. Since named entities belong to open class of words they are being created daily, so the challenge for a named entity recognizer is to precisely determine the boundaries of new entity names in any text and to analyze thoroughly their components for deep semantic analysis. Knowing their general classes of structure it should be possible to derive useful heuristics or a specific grammar for natural language processing applications.