Semantic Web based Named Entity Linking for Digital Humanities and Heritage Texts

This paper proposes a graph based methodology for automatically disambiguating authors' mentions in a corpus of French literary criticism. Candidate referents are identified and evaluated using a graph based named entity linking algorithm, which exploits a knowledge-base built out of two different resources (DBpedia and the BnF linked data). The algorithm expands previous ones applied for word sense disambiguation and entity linking, with good results. Its novelty resides in the fact that it successfully combines a generic knowledge base such as DBpedia with a domain specific one, thus enabling the efficient annotation of minor authors. This will help specialists to follow mentions of the same author in different works of literary criticism, and thus to investigate their literary appreciation over time.