Semantic relatedness approach for named entity disambiguation

Abstract

Natural Language is a mean to express and discuss about concepts, objects, events, i.e., it carries semantic contents. One of the ultimate aims of Natural Language Processing techniques is to identify the meaning of the text, providing effective ways to make a proper linkage between textual references and their referents, that is, real world objects. This work addresses the problem of giving a sense to proper names in a text, that is, automatically associating words representing Named Entities with their referents. The proposed methodology for Named Entity Disambiguation is based on Semantic Relatedness Scores obtained with a graph based model over Wikipedia. We show that, without building a Bag of Words representation of the text, but only considering named entities within the text, the proposed paradigm achieves results competitive with the state of the art on two different datasets. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.