We’re back with another big update to our AlchemyAPI content analysis / text mining service!

What’s new in this release?  Named Entity Disambiguation

Human language is not exact. Text referring to the city “Roanoke” can mean “Roanoke, Virginia” or “Roanoke, Texas“, depending on the surrounding context. Organizations and companies often have multiple nicknames, name variations, or common misspellings. Famous persons (”Michael Jackson”) often share a name with many non-famous individuals.

Named Entity Disambiguation works to solve these and other text ambiguity problems.

So how does it work?

Our disambiguation engine employs tens of millions of contextual hints describing traits of the world’s objects, individuals, and locations. We employ a variety of public and non-public data-sets.

Hints vary depending on the specific type of entity being disambiguated. For example, when disambiguating people, we utilize information on a person’s career, where they’re located, who they work for, and so on. For companies: key executives, notable products, industry, location, etc.

Whenever an entity is successfully disambiguated, additional information is returned in API responses. This includes the fully resolved, disambiguated entity name, and if available, the entity’s website and geographic coordinates.

AlchemyAPI’s Named Entity Disambiguation system resolves approximately two-dozen entity types, more than any other commercially-available text mining system!

Disambiguation functionality is available to all API preview / beta users.  If you do not currently have an API access key, please apply for one.

Also new in this release:

Source text can now optionally be returned in all named entity and keyword extraction API call results.

Updates to online API documentation.

New developer SDKs for Ruby, C, and C++.