Extracting Names from Natural-Language Text

Nominator is described, a module developed to extract proper names from natural language text, which is currently being integrated into IBM products and services, using fast and robust heuristics.

Abstract

: We describe Nominator, a module we developed to extract proper names from natural language text, which is currently being integrated into IBM products and services. Using fast and robust heuristics, Nominator locates names in text, determines what type of entity they refer to -- such as person, place or organization -- and groups together all the variant names that refer to the same entity. For example, "President Clinton", "Mr. Clinton" and "Bill Clinton" are grouped as referring to the same person. Each group is assigned a "canonical name", (e.g., "Bill Clinton") to distinguish it from other groups referring to other entities ("Clinton, New Jersey"). Nominator produces a dictionary, or database, of names associated with a collection of documents. vi Extracting Names from Natural-Language Text TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Section 1: Some principles and assumptions . . . . . . ....