Methods for precise named entity matching in digital collections

We describe an interactive system, built within the context of CLiMB project, which permits a user to locate the occurrences of named entities within a given text. The named entity tool was developed to identify references to a single art object (e.g. a particular building) with high precision in text related to images of that object in a digital collection. We start with an authoritative list of art objects, and seek to match variants of these named entities in related text. Our approach is to "decay" entities into progressively more general variants while retaining high precision. As variants become more general, and thus more ambiguous, we propose methods to disambiguate intermediate results. Our results are used to select records into which automatically generated metadata are loaded.