Named Entity Extraction and Disambiguation: The Reinforcement Effect

Named entity extraction and disambiguation have received much attention in recent years. Typical fields addressing these topics are information retrieval, natural language pro-cessing, and semantic web. Although these topics are highly dependent, almost no existing works examine this depen-dency. It is the aim of this paper to examine the dependency and show how one affects the other, and vice versa. We conducted experiments with a set of descriptions of holiday homes with the aim to extract and disambiguate toponyms as a representative example of named entities. We experi-mented with three approaches for disambiguation with the purpose to infer the country of the holiday home. We ex-amined how the effectiveness of extraction influences the effectiveness of disambiguation, and reciprocally, how filter-ing out ambiguous names (an activity that depends on the disambiguation process) improves the effectiveness of extrac-tion. Since this, in turn, may improve the effectiveness of disambiguation again, it shows that extraction and disam-biguation may reinforce each other. 1