Named Entities (NE) play a crucial role in many monolingual and multilingual Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Information Retrieval (IR) tasks, such as document search, clustering, information extraction, etc. The phenomenal growth of the Internet data and the dramatic changes in the user demographics especially among the non-English speaking parts of the world, has made identification, association and transformation Named Entities across languages a critical path problem for most NLP and IR Tasks The Fifth Workshop on Named Entities (NEWS 2015) together with a Shared Task on Transliteration is a continuous effort on top of the success of NEWS 2009 (ACL-IJCNLP 2009), NEWS 2010 (ACL 2010), NEWS 2011(IJCNLP 2011) and NEWS 2012 (ACL 2012). NEWS 2015 will continue the tradition to run a Shared Task on Transliteration, which aims to provide a common platform for benchmarking the transliteration approaches and systems across many languages. The details of Shared Task are described in the Shared Task Whitepaper. The purpose of this workshop is to bring together researchers interested in various aspects of NEs in natural language text. The shared task in this workshop will cover more language pairs and more scopes of evaluation tasks.