A caption of a multimodal message (e.g., social media post) can be identified as a named entity using an entity recognition system. The entity recognition system can use an attention-based mechanism that emphasis or de-emphasizes each data type (e.g., image, word, character) in the multimodal message based on each datatypes relevance. The output of the attention mechanism can be used to update a recurrent network to identify one or more words in the caption as being a named entity.