1. An application development environment for developing a rule-based named entity extraction system, the application development environment comprising: a heuristics modeler configured to facilitate the building of rules and lexicons for named entity extraction; a testing framework configured to enable automated regression testing of the named entity extraction system; a project settings module configured to perform project management activities for implementing the named entity extraction system; and a deployment module configured to facilitate deployment of the rule-based named entity extraction system using software components.