Named entities are typically noun phrases that refer to some specific object, person, or place. You can use the ne_chunk function to label named entities in text. Note that you have to first tokenize and tag parts of speech. This is a very simple example, but notice how the different entity types are also recognized: person, organization, and GPE, which stands for geopolitical entity. Also note how it identified the two words, Udacity and Inc, together as a single entity. Out in the wild, performance is not always great but training on a large corpus definitely helps. Named entity recognition is often used to index and search for news articles, for example, on companies of interest.