Patent ID: 8374844

Claim:
A method for named entity resolution comprising: providing a stored global distribution space comprising triples, each triple having the form w 1 .R.w 2 , where w 1 and w 2 are lexical units, and R is a syntactic relation between the lexical units w 1 and w 2 , at least some of the lexical units being named entities; with a computing device, parsing an input text string to identify a context in which an identified named entity of the input text string is used, the context including a lexical unit which is in an identified syntactic relation with the identified named entity; comparing the identified context with a plurality of stored contexts, each stored context comprising a respective lexical unit which is in an identified syntactic relation with another named entity and in which the other named entity in the stored context is associated with a class of named entity, the named entity class being selected from a plurality of classes, at least one of the plurality of classes corresponding to a metonymic use of a respective other named entity, the comparing comprising: from the stored global distribution space, identifying a sub-space comprising a subset of the triples, each of the triples in the subset comprising a stored context w 1 .R or R.w 2 and a lexical unit w 2 or w 1 , respectively, in which the stored context w 1 .R or R.w 2 is one that is also found in a triple with the identified named entity in the global distribution space and the lexical unit for at least some of the triples in the subspace comprises another named entity; for each of the plurality of stored contexts, computing a distance between the identified context and the stored context, the distance being computed as a function of a difference between a frequency of occurrence, in a distribution space derived from a training corpus, of the identified named entity in the identified context and a frequency of occurrence, in the distribution space, of the other named entity in the stored context; computing a score for each of the plurality of named entity classes based on the computed distances; and assigning a named entity class from the plurality of named entity classes to the identified named entity based on at least one of the identified context and the scores.