Does the same thing work if the name is lowercase?
Stanford nlp won't recognise "I want to go to sydney" with a location because it expects proper nouns to be capitalised for places (and other similar named entities I believe). I tried to make their case less models work but a lack of time and patience resulted in a more specific fix for what we needed.
> nlp.text('i want to go to sydney.').places()[0].city
'Sydney'
> nlp.text('tony hawk did a kickflip.').people()[0].text
'tony'
So in the first case, it clearly does recognise that Sydney is a city independent of capitalisation. In the second case, it does recognise the first name but not the last, instead tagging "hawk" as a noun. The same happens with "john smith", however "john thomas" is recognised as a full name.
Stanford nlp won't recognise "I want to go to sydney" with a location because it expects proper nouns to be capitalised for places (and other similar named entities I believe). I tried to make their case less models work but a lack of time and patience resulted in a more specific fix for what we needed.