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We present a named entity recognition and classification system that uses only probabilistic character-level features. Classifications by multiple orthographic tries are combined in a hidden Markov model framework to incorporate both internal and contextual evidence. As part of the system, we perform a preprocessing stage in which capitalisation is restored to sentence-initial and all-caps words with high accuracy. We report f-values of 86.65 and 79.78 for English, and 50.62 and 54.43 for the German datasets.