There's a number of tools that do entity linking (that's the phrase you're looking for), including some open source ones. We've evaluated and used quite a few

There's a number of tools that do entity linking (that's the phrase you're looking for), including some open source ones. We've evaluated and used quite a few over the years: there's Dexter [0] by Diego Ceccarelli, Semanticizer by UvA [1] and DBpedia Spotlight [2] and a few others. We've used them for various linking tasks, such as detecting "work skills" in plain text (HR domain) or detecting drug names (medical domain). The amount to which these tools allow "customization" (ease of plugging in your own ontology, support for input format and disambiguation signals) differs. Either way, even though this research includes open source code, the code is more of the "research prototype" kind. Don't expect a plug&play optimized production tool. [0] http://dexter.isti.cnr.it/ http://dexter.isti.cnr.it/ [1] https://github.com/semanticize/semanticizer https://github.com/semanticize/semanticizer [2] https://github.com/dbpedia-spotlight/dbpedia-spotlight https://github.com/dbpedia-spotlight/dbpedia-spotlight