title: Stanford NER toolkit - lowercase entities recognition
body: <p>I am a newbie to NLP and trying to figure out how a Named Entity Recognizer annotates named entities. I am experimenting with Stanford NER toolkit. When I use the NER on standard more formal datasets where all naming conventions are followed to represent named entities such as in newswires or news blogs, the NER annotates the entities correctly. However when I run NER with informal datasets such as twitter, where named entities might not be capitalized as should have been, The NER does not annotate the entities. The classifier that I am using is a 3-CRF serialised classifer. Can anybody let me know how can I make the NER recognize lower case entities too?? Any useful suggestions on how to hack the NER and where this improvement is to be done is greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance for all your help.</p>