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.