A CRF for NER makes use of very similar features to a POS tagger, as shown in Figure 8 .15. identity of w i , identity of neighboring words embeddings for w i , embeddings for neighboring words part of speech of w i , part of speech of neighboring words presence of w i in a gazetteer w i contains a particular prefix (from all prefixes of length ≤ 4) w i contains a particular suffix (from all suffixes of length ≤ 4) word shape of w i , word shape of neighboring words short word shape of w i , short word shape of neighboring words gazetteer features Figure 8 .15 Typical features for a feature-based NER system. One feature that is especially useful for locations is a gazetteer, a list of place gazetteer names, often providing millions of entries for locations with detailed geographical and political information. 3 This can be implemented as a binary feature indicating a phrase appears in the list. Other related resources like name-lists, for example from the United States Census Bureau 4 , can be used, as can other entity dictionaries like lists of corporations or products, although they may not be as helpful as a gazetteer (Mikheev et al., 1999) .