Named entity extraction with conjunction disambiguation

The recognition of named entities is now a well-developed area, with a range of symbolic and machine learning techniques that deliver high accuracy extraction and categorisation of a variety of entity types. However, there are still some named entity phenomena that present problems for existing techniques; in particular, relatively little work has explored the disambiguation of conjunctions appearing in candidate named entity strings. We demonstrate that there are in fact four distinct uses of conjunctions in the context of named entities; we present some experiments using machine-learned classifiers to disambiguate the different uses of the conjunction, with 85% of test examples being correctly classified.