4. The method of claim 1 wherein the disambiguating which entities are being referred to in the indicated text segment by determining of the one or more mostly likely entities which are referred to in the text segment by comparing, using both linguistic and contextual information, the entity profiles generated for each potential entity name with attributes of one or more candidate entities further comprises: searching a knowledge repository for a set of candidate entities that have similar characteristics to the properties of one or more of the generated entity profiles; ranking the candidate entities in the set of candidate entities to determine a set of mostly likely entities which are referred to in the text segment; and providing the determined set of mostly likely entities.
4. The method of claim 1 wherein the disambiguating which entities are being referred to in the indicated text segment by determining of the one or more mostly likely entities which are referred to in the text segment by comparing, using both linguistic and contextual information, the entity profiles generated for each potential entity name with attributes of one or more candidate entities further comprises: searching a knowledge repository for a set of candidate entities that have similar characteristics to the properties of one or more of the generated entity profiles; ranking the candidate entities in the set of candidate entities to determine a set of mostly likely entities which are referred to in the text segment; and providing the determined set of mostly likely entities. 7. The method of claim 4 wherein the ranking the candidate entities further comprises using a classifier, of a classification model constructed from training data, to classify the candidate entities and to order them based upon closest matches.