15. A non-transitory computer-readable medium containing contents that, when executed causes a computing system to perform a method 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 entities which are referred to in the text segment by potential entity names; generating and storing, for each potential entity, an entity profile data structure storing one or more associated properties that characterize the entity based upon surrounding context and linguistic information, the entity profile properties including one or more roles attributable to the potential entity based upon actions and/or modifiers associated with the entity name that have been retrieved from a linguistic analysis of the surrounding context; automatically disambiguating which entities are being referred to in the indicated text segment by determining one or more mostly likely entities that are referred to in the text segment by comparing, using both linguistic and contextual information, the entity profiles generated for each potential entity with attributes of one or more candidate entities retrieved from a knowledge base; and causing information to be annotated on a web page.
15. A non-transitory computer-readable medium containing contents that, when executed causes a computing system to perform a method 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 entities which are referred to in the text segment by potential entity names; generating and storing, for each potential entity, an entity profile data structure storing one or more associated properties that characterize the entity based upon surrounding context and linguistic information, the entity profile properties including one or more roles attributable to the potential entity based upon actions and/or modifiers associated with the entity name that have been retrieved from a linguistic analysis of the surrounding context; automatically disambiguating which entities are being referred to in the indicated text segment by determining one or more mostly likely entities that are referred to in the text segment by comparing, using both linguistic and contextual information, the entity profiles generated for each potential entity with attributes of one or more candidate entities retrieved from a knowledge base; and causing information to be annotated on a web page. 18. The non-transitory computer-readable medium of claim 15 embedded in a computing system configured to perform indexing and storing of a corpus of documents for searching using natural language processing.