The manual curation of knowledge bases is a bottleneck in fast paced domains where new concepts constantly emerge. Identification of nascent concepts is important for improving early entity linking, content interpretation, and recommendation of new content in real-time applications. We present an unsupervised method for generating pseudo-ground truth for training a named entity recognizer to specifically identify entities that will become concepts in a knowledge base in the setting of social streams. We show that our method is able to deal with missing labels, justifying the use of pseudo-ground truth generation in this task. Finally, we show how our method significantly outperforms a lexical-matching baseline, by leveraging strategies for sampling pseudo-ground truth based on entity confidence scores and textual quality of input documents.