1. A computer-implemented method for disambiguating 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 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 received from the performed linguistic analysis of the processed text segment, the entity profile properties including one or more roles attributable to the potential entity based upon actions and/or modifiers associated with the determined potential entity name that have been retrieved from a linguistic analysis of the surrounding context; 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 data repository; and invoking the method to annotate information on a web page.
1. A computer-implemented method for disambiguating 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 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 received from the performed linguistic analysis of the processed text segment, the entity profile properties including one or more roles attributable to the potential entity based upon actions and/or modifiers associated with the determined potential entity name that have been retrieved from a linguistic analysis of the surrounding context; 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 data repository; and invoking the method to annotate information on a web page. 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.