"Named entities" is the NLP jargon for proper nouns which represent people, places, organisations, and so on. This module provides a very simple way of extracting these from a text. If we run the "extract_entities" routine on a piece of news coverage of recent UK political events, we should expect to see it return a list of hash references looking like this: { entity => 'Mr Howard', class => 'person', scores => { ... }, }, { entity => 'Ministry of Defence', class => 'organisation', ... }, { entity => 'Oxfordshire', class => 'place', ... }, The additional "scores" hash reference in there breaks down the various possible classes for this entity in an open-ended scale.