When someone says “Mercury”…

From Google Research Blog – Learning from Big Data: 40 Million Entities in Context

When someone mentions Mercury, are they talking about the planet, the god, the car, the elementFreddie, or one of some 89 other possibilities? This problem is called disambiguation (a word that is itself ambiguous), and while it’s necessary for communication, and humans are amazingly good at it (when was the last time you confused a fruit with agiant tech company?), computers need help.

Uses of big data are exploding. But in the case of unstructured data, context can help a lot. And this context is probably just to give us a taste.