Extracting mnemonic names of people from the web

Abstract

The web has gained much attention as new media reflecting real-time interest in the world. This attention is driven by the proliferation of tools like bulletin boards and weblogs. The web is a source from which we can collect and summarize information about a particular object (e.g., business organization, product, person, etc.) For example, the extraction of reputation information is a major research topic in information extraction and knowledge extraction from the web. The ability to collect web pages about a particular object is essential in obtaining such information and extracting knowledge from it. A big problem in the web page collection process is that the same objects are referred to in different ways in different web documents. For example, a person may be referred to by full name, first name, affiliation and title, or nicknames. This paper proposes a method for extracting these mnemonic names of people from the web and shows experimental results using real web data. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.