%A Bornet,Cyril %A Kaplan,Frédéric %D 2017 %J Frontiers in Digital Humanities %C %F %G English %K text processing,named entity recognition,ner,Literature,french,Distant reading %Q %R 10.3389/fdigh.2017.00006 %W %L %M %P %7 %8 2017-March-31 %9 Technology Report %+ Cyril Bornet,Digital Humanities Laboratory, DHI, CDH, EPFL,Switzerland,cyril.bornet@gmail.com %# %! A simple set of rules for characters and place detection in French novels %* %< %T A Simple Set of Rules for Characters and Place Recognition in French Novels %U https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fdigh.2017.00006 %V 4 %0 JOURNAL ARTICLE %@ 2297-2668 %X This article describes a simple unsupervised system for automatic extraction and classification of named entities in French novels. The solution presented combines a set of different standalone classifiers within a meta-recognition system. The system is tested on 35 classic French novels, representing 5 million words and 3,700 names of people and places. The results demonstrate that although none of the standalone methods clearly outperforms the others, their combined classification offers a robust solution in this context.