Extracting social networks and contact information from email and the Web

Abstract

We present an end-to-end system that extracts a user’s social network and its members’ contact information given the user’s email inbox. The system identifies unique people in email, finds their Web presence, and automatically fills the fields of a contact address book using conditional random fields—a type of probabilistic model well-suited for such information extraction tasks. By recursively calling itself on new people discovered on the Web, the system builds a social network with multiple degrees of separation from the user. Additionally, a set of expertise-describing keywords are extracted and associated with each person. We outline the collection of statistical and learning components that enable this system, and present experimental results on the real email of two users; we also present some new preliminary results with a method of learning transfer, and discuss the capabilities of the system for address-book population, expert-finding, and social network analysis.