How spaCy perform NER?

[teohsinyee]

If all data were lowercase, will it affect NER?
Is casing important to NER?

I did simple experiment using displaCy Named Entity Visualizer

Cased sentence: when Jason started working on self-driving cars at Google in 2007.
Uncased sentence: when jason started working on self-driving cars at google in 2007.

Displacy able to identify Organization & Person from Cased sentence. But NO entities were identified from Uncased sentence.

I'm wondering why & how spaCy model identify 'Google' but can't identify 'google'?

[thomashacker]

Yes, the NER architecture uses features likes NORM and SHAPE which are both case-sensitive. The pre-trained models are not 100% accurate, and mistakes like these can happen. We have a master thread for these cases.