Fine grained classification of named entities

While Named Entity extraction is useful in many natural language applications, the coarse categories that most NE extractors work with prove insufficient for complex applications such as Question Answering and Ontology generation. We examine one coarse category of named entities, persons, and describe a method for automatically classifying person instances into eight finer-grained subcategories. We present a supervised learning method that considers the local context surrounding the entity as well as more global semantic information derived from topic signatures and WordNet. We reinforce this method with an algorithm that takes advantage of the presence of entities in multiple contexts.