Is Hillary Rodham Clinton The President? Disambiguating Names Across Documents

A number of research and software development groups have developed name identification technology, but few have addressed the issue of cross-document coreference, or identifying the same named entities across documents. In a collection of documents, where there are multiple discourse contexts, there exists a manyto-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 similarity between the document contexts in which they appear. Inspired by their approach, we have revisited our current crossdocument 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.