DBpedia Spotlight is a tool for annotating mentions of DBpedia resources in text, providing a solution for linking unstructured information sources to the Linked Open Data cloud through DBpedia. DBpedia Spotlight performs named entity extraction, including entity detection and Name Resolution (a.k.a. disambiguation). It can also be used for building your solution for Named Entity Recognition, amongst other information extraction tasks.
B. Berendt, A. Hotho, and G. Stumme. International Semantic Web Conference, volume 2342 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, page 264 - 278. Springer Verlag, (2002)
E. Keogh, S. Lonardi, and C. Ratanamahatana. KDD '04: Proceedings of the tenth ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining, page 206--215. New York, NY, USA, ACM, (2004)