Is Hillary Rodham Clinton the President? Disambiguating Names accross Documents

A number of research and software development groups have name identification
technology, but few have addressed the issue of cross-document co-reference, or
identifying the same entities across documents. In a collection of documents, where
there are multiple discourse contexts, there exists a many-to-many correspondence
between names and entities, making it a challenge to automatically map them correctly.
Recently, Bagga and Baldwin proposed a method for determining whether two names 
refer to the same entity by measuring the similiarity between the document contexts
in which they appear. Inspired by their approach, we have revisited our current
corss-document coreference heuristics that make relatively simple decisions based
on matching strings and entity types. We have devised an improved and promising
algorithm, which we discuss in this paper.