A knowledge-free method for capitalized word disambiguation

Abstract

In this paper we present an approach to the disambiguation of capitalized words when they are used in the positions where capitalization is expected, such as the first word in a sentence or after a period, quotes, etc.. Such words can act as proper names or can be just capitalized variants of common words. The main feature of our approach is that it uses a minimum of pre-built resources and tries to dynamically infer the disambiguation clues from the entire document. The approach was thoroughly tested and achieved about 98.5% accuracy on unseen texts from The New York Times 1996 corpus.