Lists of names are an important knowledge source for many systems which carry out named entity recognition. It is shown that augmenting hand-crafted lists with those derived from corpora can improve their performance. Two methods for improving automatically acquired lists are presented. The best corpus-derived lists are shown to out-perform the hand-crafted ones by 4%. 1. Introduction Named entity (NE) recognition is the process of identifying and categorising names in text. NE recognition and corpora research can be mutually benficial. Corpora are often more valuable when linguistic information has been added to them. For example the SUZANNE and Penn TreeBank corpora contain texts which have been parsed and as a consequence these corpora are widely used resources in NLP research. In a similar fashion NE recognition can be used to annotate the names in texts and thereby produce a richer corpus. Conversely, the information in annotated corpora can be very useful in the development of...