**Named Entity Recognition (NER)** is a task in **Natural Language Processing (NLP)** that involves identifying and categorizing entities mentioned in a text into predefined categories such as:

- **Persons** (e.g., *"Elon Musk"*)
- **Locations** (e.g., *"New York"*)
- **Organizations** (e.g., *"OpenAI"*)
- **Dates** (e.g., *"January 18, 2025"*)
- **Numerical values** (e.g., *"67 years old"*, *"$10 million"*)
- **Products** (e.g., *"iPhone 15"*, *"ChatGPT"*).

NER is widely used in applications like **information extraction, sentiment analysis, question answering, and summarization**.