Disambiguation of proper names in text

Abstract

Identifying the occurrences of proper names in text and the entities they refer to can be a difficult task because of the many-to-many mapping between names and their referents. We analyze the types of ambiguity --- structural and semantic --- that make the discovery of proper names difficult in text, and describe the heuristics used to disambiguate names in Nominator, a fully-implemented module for proper name recognition developed at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center.