Patent ID: 8538898

Claim:
A method for disambiguating entity names for objects, comprising using a computing device to perform steps for: receiving one or more sets of objects; extracting one or more features from each objects; using the extracted features for training a global support vector machine (SVM) model that clusters all of the objects into a global data set comprising two types of maximum recognition units (MRUs) including “verified MRUs” and “unverified MRUs”, and wherein only the verified MRUs have accurately known entities associated with those objects; identifying features of each MRU as the union of the corresponding features of all of the individual objects comprising each MRU; iteratively training a separate local model for each different entity from the global data set and the corresponding features of each MRU using an “interactive SVM” modeling process that includes: presenting a ranked list of MRUs to a user based on a user search for a particular entity, receiving user selection of zero or more MRUs from the ranked list that have an entity matching the user search, merging any selected MRUs into a verified MRU having an accurately known entity matching the user search, merging zero or more additional MRUs where such mergers are in accordance with a set of predefined feature-based merge rules, and retraining the separate local model for each different entity based on the user input and the features associated with any merged MRUs.