Current state of the art in named entity recognition (NER)?

Hi,

years ago I used to follow the results in the field of Named Entity Recognition (i.e. identifying references to People, Places, Companies, and other proper nouns in documents) but I got pulled toward other interests and I feel that my knowledge of the field is a bit out of date. If there are any experts in this field here, I would be very grateful to hear your opinions about what the current state of the art in this field is, and any exciting new directions that you could see on the horizon. I would be especially interested in hearing about any progress toward commercial application.