NLP : Is Gazetteer a cheat

Question

In NLP there is a concept of Gazetteer which can be quite useful for creating annotations. As far as i understand,

A gazetteer consists of a set of lists containing names of entities such as cities, organisations, days of the week, etc. These lists are used to find occurrences of these names in text, e.g. for the task of named entity recognition.

So it is essentially a lookup. Isn't this kind of a cheat? If we use a Gazetteer for detecting named entities, then there is not much Natural Language Processing going on. Ideally, i would want to detect named entities using NLP techniques. Otherwise how is it any better than a regex pattern matcher.

Does that make sense?

Answer 1

Depends on how you built/use your gazetteer. If you are presenting experiments in a closed domain and you custom picked your gazetteer, then yes, you are cheating. If you are using some openly available gazetteer and performing experiments on a large dataset or using it in an application in the wild where you don't control the input then you are fine. We found ourselves in a similar situation. We partition our dataset and use the training data to automatically build our gazetteers. As long as you report your methodology you should not feel like cheating (let the reviewers complain).