Arabic cross-document person name normalization

This paper presents a machine learning approach based on an SVM classifier coupled with preprocessing rules for cross-document named entity normalization. The classifier uses lexical, orthographic, phonetic, and morphological features. The process involves disambiguating different entities with shared name mentions and normalizing identical entities with different name mentions. In evaluating the quality of the clusters, the reported approach achieves a cluster F-measure of 0.93. The approach is significantly better than the two baseline approaches in which none of the entities are normalized or entities with exact name mentions are normalized. The two baseline approaches achieve cluster F-measures of 0.62 and 0.74 respectively. The classifier properly normalizes the vast majority of entities that are misnormalized by the baseline system.