Abstract: Chinese place name recognition is a research topic in named entity recognition, and a key to improve the application level of the geographic information systems in China. The traditional place name recognition method is based on the element characteristics of a place name and the part of speech of words, and employs limited features. This paper proposes a method of Chinese place name recognition method using syntactic features, and mines the syntactic characteristics of place names in natural language. The design employs four syntactic features, class, path, distance, and number, in conditional random fields (CRF) to train and recognize Chinese place names based on place name element s, position of speech (POS) and syntactic features. Comparative experiments with composite features and traditional features for Chinese place name show that with the help of the three composite feature, s Chinese place name recognition accuracy and recall rate can be improved effectively and with good results for complex place names.