Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a process in natural language processing that identifies and classifies key elements in text into predefined categories. These categories typically include people, organizations, locations, dates, and monetary values. NER helps in understanding the context and significance of the information presented in a text. By using algorithms and machine learning techniques, NER systems can automatically extract these entities from large volumes of unstructured data. This capability is valuable in various applications, such as search engines, chatbots, and information retrieval systems, where quick and accurate data processing is essential.