Software on a website serves a user of an online content aggregation service a first article that the user views. The software extracts named entities from the first article using a named-entity recognizer. The named-entity recognizer uses a sequence of word embeddings as inputs to a conditional random field (CRF) tool to assign labels to each of the word embeddings. Each of the word embeddings is associated with a word in the first article and is trained using an entire topical article from a corpus of topical articles as a context for the word. The software then creates rankings for articles ingested by the content aggregation service based at least in part on the named entities and serves the user a second article using the rankings.