A system for improved natural language understanding (NLU) provides pre-feature input to a named entity recognition (NER) component. Pre-features may include no-textually derived information associated with the circumstances describing a user command (such as time, location, etc.). A domain and/or intent may also be determined prior to NER processing and may be passed to the NER component as an input. The pre-features and/or domain or intent information may assist the NER processing by providing context to a textual input, thereby improving NER processing such as semantic tagging, which in turn may improve overall NLU processing quality.