From names to entities using thematic context distance

Name ambiguity arises from the polysemy of names and causes uncertainty about the true identity of entities referenced in unstructured text. This is a major problem in areas like information retrieval or knowledge management, for example when searching for a speci c entity or updating an existing knowledge base. We approach this problem of named entity disambiguation (NED) using thematic information derived from Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to compare the entity mention's context with candidate entities in Wikipedia represented by their respective articles. We evaluate various distances over topic distributions in a supervised classi cation setting to nd the best suited candidate entity, which is either covered in Wikipedia or unknown. We compare our approach to a state of the art m ethod and show that it achieves significantly better results in predictive performance, regarding both entities covered in Wikipedia as well as uncovered entities. We show that our approach is in general language independent as we obtain equally good results for named entity disambiguation using the English, the German and the French Wikipedia.