Disambiguating Personal Names on the Web Using Automatically Extracted Key Phrases

Abstract. When you search for information regarding a particular person on the web, a search engine returns many pages. Some of these pages may be for people with the same name. How can we disambiguate these different people with the same name? This paper presents an unsupervised algorithm which produces unique phrases to disambiguate different people with the same name (i.e. namesakes). Our algorithm takes in a personal name and outputs multiple sets of phrases which uniquely identify the different namesakes on the web. These phrases could then be added to the query to narrow down the search to a specific namesake. We evaluated the algorithm on a collection of documents retreived from the Web. Experimental results show a significant improvement over the existing methods proposed for this task.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: ECAI
• Authors: Danushka Bollegala, Yutaka Matsuo, Mitsuru Ishizuka
• Keywords: Algorithm, Artificial Intelligence, ECAI 2006, Unique Phrases, Unsupervised Algorithm