41. The apparatus of claim 22 , wherein the corpus of electronic documents comprises an electronic database of articles.
22. An apparatus for creating an electronic database of disambiguated entity mentions from a corpus of electronic documents, comprising: a microprocessor; a data harvesting module comprising program instructions that, when executed by microprocessor, will cause the microprocessor to automatically extract entity mentions from the corpus of electronic documents and parse the entity mentions to produce one or more mention objects; a mention group creation module comprising program instructions that, when executed by microprocessor, will cause the microprocessor to automatically create one or more mention groups by automatically grouping mention objects together according to a distinguishing attribute common to a given class of mention objects; a collection of comparison modules having program instructions that, when executed by microprocessor, will cause the microprocessor to automatically (i) compare every mention object in a selected mention group with every other mention object in the selected mention group to produce a collection of comparison algorithm scores for every pair of mention objects in the selected mention group, and (ii) generate an overall confidence score for every pair of mention objects in the selected mention group based on the collection of comparison algorithm scores for said every pair; and an entity object creation module having program instructions that, when executed by microprocessor, will cause the microprocessor to automatically create in the electronic database one or more new entity objects for the selected mention group by automatically (i) grouping together mention objects with other mention objects, based on the confidence scores of each pair of mention objects and a specified confidence threshold, wherein pairs of mention objects having a confidence score greater than or equal to the specified threshold are assigned to the same new entity object, and (ii) merging previously-created entity objects with other previously-created entity objects, based on the confidence scores of each pair of entity objects, and a specified confidence threshold, wherein pairs of entity objects having a confidence score greater than or equal to the specified threshold are assigned to the same new entity object.