For anyone else looking, I found this article to be useful: http://timmcnamara.co.nz/post/2650550090/extracting-names-with-6-lines-of-python-code
>>> import nltk
>>> def extract_entities(text):
... for sent in nltk.sent_tokenize(text):
... for chunk in nltk.ne_chunk(nltk.pos_tag(nltk.word_tokenize(sent))):
... if hasattr(chunk, 'node'):
... print chunk.node, ' '.join(c[0] for c in chunk.leaves())
...