Method of integrating Flex and Yacc (or their respective equivalents) into a named entity recognition engine used as a component of a general text processing system is provided. The named entity recognition engine adds results into a central representation or lattice for use by various subsequent applications. The applications can configure which named entity classes or types are recognized via an application program interface. The text processing system configures input and output through the lattice for Flex and Yacc to maintain high performance. Optionally, the text processing system minimizes expensive lexicon look-up by maximizing named entity constituents matched by Flex-generated recognizers.