Nymble: a High-Performance Learning Name-finder
  This paper presents a statistical, learned approach to finding names and other non-recursive entities in text (as per the MUC-6 definition of the NE task), using a variant of the standard hidden Markov model. We present our justification for the problem and our approach, a detailed discussion of the model itself and finally the successful results of this new approach. 
Daniel M. Bikel (BBN), Scott Miller (BBN), Richard Schwartz (BBN),   Ralph Weischedel (BBN)