With the sentence "場所は多少わかりづらいんですけど、感じのいいところでした。" (i.e. "It is a bit hard to find, but it is a nice place.") using mecab with -d mecab-unidic-neologd the first line of output is:
場所 バショ バショ 場所 名詞-固有名詞-人名-姓
I.e. it says "場所" is a person's surname. Using normal mecab-unidic it more accurately says the "場所" is just a simple noun.
場所 バショ バショ 場所 名詞-普通名詞-一般
My first question is has unidic-neologd replaced all the entries in unidic, or has it simply appended its 3 million proper nouns?
Then, secondly, assuming it is a merger, is it possibly to re-weight the entries, to prefer plain unidic entries a bit more strongly? I.e. I'd love to be getting 中居正広のミになる図書館 and SMAP each recognized as single proper nouns, but I also need it to see that 場所 is always going to mean "place" (except in the cases it is followed by a name suffix such as さん or 様, of course).
References: unidic-neologd