We present a method for constructing, maintaining and consulting a database of proper nouns. We describe noun phrases composed of a proper noun a n d / o r a description of a human occupation. They are formalized by finite state transducers (FST) and large coverage dictionaries and are applied to a corpus of newspapers. We take into account synonymy and hyperonymy. This first stage of our parsing procedure has a high degree of accuracy. We show how we can handle requests such as: 'Find all newspaper articles in a general corpus mentioning the French prime minister', or 'How.
