Drug name recognition (DNR), which seeks to recognize drug mentions in unstructured medical texts and classify them into pre-defined categories, is a fundamental task of medical information extraction, and is a key component of many medical relation extraction systems and applications. A large number of efforts have been devoted to DNR, and great progress has been made in DNR in the last several decades. We present here a comprehensive review of studies on DNR from various aspects such as the challenges of DNR, the existing approaches and resources for DNR, and possible directions.
