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  "identifier" : "/documentation/Foundation/identifying-people-places-and-organizations",
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  "title" : "Identifying People, Places, and Organizations"
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# Identifying People, Places, and Organizations

Use a linguistic tagger to perform named entity recognition on a string.

## Discussion

Identifying named entities in natural language text can help make your app more intelligent. For example, a messaging app might look for names of people and places in text in order to display related information like contact information or directions.

The example below shows how to use [`NSLinguisticTagger`](/documentation/Foundation/NSLinguisticTagger) to enumerate over natural language text and identify any named person, place, or organization.

```swift
let text = "The American Red Cross was established in Washington, D.C., by Clara Barton."
let tagger = NSLinguisticTagger(tagSchemes: [.nameType], options: 0)
tagger.string = text
let range = NSRange(location:0, length: text.utf16.count)
let options: NSLinguisticTagger.Options = [.omitPunctuation, .omitWhitespace, .joinNames]
let tags: [NSLinguisticTag] = [.personalName, .placeName, .organizationName]
tagger.enumerateTags(in: range, unit: .word, scheme: .nameType, options: options) { tag, tokenRange, stop in
    if let tag = tag, tags.contains(tag) {
        let name = (text as NSString).substring(with: tokenRange)
        print("\(name): \(tag)")
    }
}
```

First, an instance of [`NSLinguisticTagger`](/documentation/Foundation/NSLinguisticTagger) is created, specifying [`nameType`](/documentation/Foundation/NSLinguisticTagScheme/nameType) as the tag scheme to be used. Next, the [`string`](/documentation/Foundation/NSLinguisticTagger/string) property of the linguistic tagger is set to the natural language text. Finally, the linguistic tagger enumerates over the entire range of the string, specifying [`NSLinguisticTaggerUnit.word`](/documentation/Foundation/NSLinguisticTaggerUnit/word) as the tag unit and [`nameType`](/documentation/Foundation/NSLinguisticTagScheme/nameType) as the tag scheme, omitting any punctuation or whitespace, and joining words that are part of a single name into the same token. In the enumeration block, the name type is provided by `tag`, and each word is obtained by taking a substring of the original text at `tokenRange`.

When run, this code prints out each name and its type on a new line, as shown below:

|Name                  |Type                                                                                    |
|----------------------|----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
|The American Red Cross|``doc://com.apple.foundation/documentation/Foundation/NSLinguisticTag/organizationName``|
|Washington, D.C.      |``doc://com.apple.foundation/documentation/Foundation/NSLinguisticTag/placeName``       |
|Clara Barton          |``doc://com.apple.foundation/documentation/Foundation/NSLinguisticTag/personalName``    |

## See Also

[Tokenizing Natural Language Text](/documentation/Foundation/tokenizing-natural-language-text)

Enumerate the words in a string.


---

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