Next, try the taggers on a more realistic setting than the standard corpuses -- e.g. a product review that compares several products, and you'll instantly see how incredibly poor the current state of the art NER is.<p>Technology is really going to advance once we have anything that comes close to human level on NER and relation extraction. Kind of like self driving cars, the basic ideas have been around for decades, but performance in realistic adverse conditions remains awful for almost everywhere that it could theoretically be used.