Are there any well known algorithms to detect the presence of names?

Question

For example, given a string:

"Bob went fishing with his friend Jim Smith."

Bob and Jim Smith are both names, but bob and smith are both words. Weren't for them being uppercase, there would be less indication of this outside of our knowledge of the sentence. Are there any well known algorithms for detecting the presence of names, at least Western names?

Answer 1

Take a look at Named Entity Recognition.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Named_entity_recognition The article links to two good implementations.

Im not sure if this falls under your definition of grammar analysis though.