The amount of textual information available electronically has made it difficult for many users to find and access the right information within acceptable time. Research communities in the Natural Language Processing (NLP) field are developing tools and techniques to alleviate these problems and help users in exploiting these vast resources. These techniques include Information Retrieval (IR) and Information Extraction (IE). The paper described in this paper, concerns IE and more specifically, named entity extraction in English. The English language is of significant interest to the NLP community mainly due to its political and economic significance, but also due to its interesting characteristics.