Abstract: disambiguation of proper names in text

Authors: 
Nina Wacholder, CRIA, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027 
Yael Ravin, TJ Watson Research Center, IBM, Yorktown Heights, NY 10598 
Misook Choi, TJ Watson Research Center, IBM, Yorktown Heights, NY 10598 

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.