46. The computer-readable storage medium of claim 44 , wherein the executable program further includes program instructions to cause the microprocessor to normalize the distinguishing common attribute for each mention object in the given class according to a set of normalization rules prior to grouping the mention objects together based on the distinguishing common attribute.
44. A non-transitory computer-readable storage medium with an executable program for creating an electronic database of disambiguated entity mentions from a corpus of electronic documents stored thereon, wherein the executable program comprises instructions to cause a microprocessor to: (a) automatically extract entity mentions from the corpus of electronic documents and parse the entity mentions into mention objects; (b) create one or more mention groups by automatically grouping the mention objects together according to a distinguishing attribute common to a given class of mention objects; (c) select a mention group from the one or more mention groups for comparison processing; (d) automatically compare every mention object in the 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; (e) 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; (f) create in the electronic database of disambiguated entity mentions 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; (g) repeat steps (c) through (f) above until all of the one or more mention groups have been comparison processed.