1. A computer-implemented method for identifying one or more entities in an indicated text segment, comprising: processing the indicated text segment to determine a plurality of terms and their associated parts-of-speech tags and grammatical roles; performing linguistic analysis of the processed text segment to determine one or more potential entity names which are referred to in the text segment; generating, for each potential entity name, an entity profile having one or more associated properties that characterize the entity based upon surrounding context; and determining one or more mostly likely entities which are referred to in the text segment by comparing the entity profiles generated for each potential entity name with one or more candidate entities using both linguistic and contextual information.