Researchers have reportedly developed new software, which establishes connections between the mentions of names in a text and potential persons or places.
The software, named AIDA, enables accurately resolving conflicts of named entities by analyzing them with the help of the free Internet encyclopedia, Wikipedia.
Co-developer of AIDA, Johannes Hoffart, said that the more references exist between a mention and a specific person in Wikipedia, the more words of the person's Wikipedia article can also be found in the input text and the higher the score the mention-entity edge receives.
To demonstrate their novel technique, the researchers have also implemented a search engine, which not only makes it possible to combine the search for strings with the search for specific objects, like persons and locations, but also to search on categories.
Scientific Director at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbrucken, Gerhard Weikum, said that this technique would not only help them build better search engines, but also would make computers understand texts almost as a human.