Deep Neural Networks for Matching Online Social Networking Profiles

Abstract

This paper details a novel method for grouping together online social networking profiles of the same person extracted from different sources. Name ambiguity arises naturally in any culture due to the popularity of specific names which are shared by a large number of people. This is one of the main problems in people search, which is also multiplied by the number of different data sources that contain information about the same person. Grouping pages from various social networking websites in order to disambiguate between different individuals with the same name is an important task in people search. This allows building a detailed description and a consolidated online identity for each individual. Our results show that given a large enough dataset, neural networks and word embeddings provide the best method to solve this problem.