CoNLL-2003 Dataset

CoNLL-2003 Named Entity
Dataset

The most classic benchmark dataset in the field of named entity recognition, containing four types of entity annotations from Reuters news corpus, and still the gold standard for NER model evaluation.

~35,000 sentences 4 types of entities Open research license Tjong Kim Sang et al. (2003)
CoNLL-2003 Dataset
📊
~35K
Total number of sentences
🏷️
4
Entity types
🌐
2
Languages (EN/DE)
📜
IOB2
Annotation format

Dataset Highlights

The most influential sequence labeling benchmark in the NLP field, cited by thousands of papers

🏆

Gold Standard Benchmark

Since its release in 2003, CoNLL-2003 has been the standard evaluation benchmark for named entity recognition tasks, widely adopted by academia and industry.

📰

Real News Corpus

The English data comes from Reuters news reports, and the German data comes from the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper, covering diverse texts from the real world.

🏷️

Four Types of Entity Annotation

Includes four types of entities: PER (person names), LOC (location names), ORG (organization names), and MISC (miscellaneous), covering the main categories of named entities.

🌍

Bilingual Dataset

Provides two language versions in English (~22,137 sentences) and German (~12,705 sentences), supporting cross-language NER research and multilingual model evaluation.

📐

Rich Annotation Hierarchy

Each token is annotated with part-of-speech (POS) tags, syntactic chunk tags, and named entity (NER) tags, supporting multi-task learning.

🔬

Standardized Evaluation

Provides a unified division of training, validation, and test sets, along with standardized F1 evaluation metrics, ensuring fair comparison of different models.

Applicable Scenarios

From academic research to industrial applications, NER technology is everywhere

🔖

Named Entity Recognition

Train and evaluate NER models, such as BiLSTM-CRF, BERT, RoBERTa, and other sequence labeling models

📋

Sequence Labeling Research

As a general benchmark for sequence labeling tasks, test the labeling performance of different architectures like CRF and Transformer

🔍

Information Extraction

Extract structured information such as names, locations, and organizations from unstructured text to build knowledge graphs

🤖

Token Classification

Train Token Classification models to provide entity recognition capabilities for downstream tasks such as question answering systems and text summarization

Named Entity Recognition Sequence Labeling Information Extraction NLP Benchmark Text Mining

Data Preview

The following is an example of the annotation format of the CoNLL-2003 dataset, with each column representing: word, part of speech, chunk, entity label

CoNLL
# word     POS    chunk   NER
EU       NNP    B-NP    B-ORG
rejects  VBZ    B-VP    O
German   JJ     B-NP    B-MISC
call     NN     I-NP    O
to       TO     B-VP    O
boycott  VB     I-VP    O
British  JJ     B-NP    B-MISC
lamb     NN     I-NP    O
.        .      O       O
Peter    NNP    B-NP    B-PER
Blackburn NNP   I-NP    I-PER
BRUSSELS NNP    B-NP    B-LOC
1996-08-22 CD   I-NP    O
The      DT     B-NP    O
European NNP    I-NP    B-ORG
Commission NNP  I-NP    I-ORG
said     VBD    B-VP    O
on       IN     B-PP    O
Thursday NNP    B-NP    O
it       PRP    B-NP    O
disagreed VBD   B-VP    O
with     IN     B-PP    O
a        DT     B-NP    O
German   JJ     I-NP    B-MISC
advisory JJ     I-NP    O
committee NN    I-NP    O
.

3 Steps to Get Started Quickly

Start your NER research project in just a few minutes, from browsing to modeling

01

Browse Datasets

View dataset details on the Ace Data Cloud platform, understand entity type definitions, annotation specifications, and metadata such as dataset splits.

02

Download Data

Obtain training, validation, and test set files in English and German, with CoNLL column format ready to use, no additional preprocessing required.

03

Load and Train

Use datasets.load_dataset("conll2003") or directly parse column format files to start training your NER model.

Start Exploring the CoNLL-2003 Dataset

The gold standard benchmark in the NER field, open research license, available immediately. Whether you are a beginner in NLP or an experienced researcher, this dataset is an essential evaluation tool.