Automatic Discovery of Personal Name Aliases from the Web

An individual is typically referred by numerous name aliases on the web. Accurate identification of aliases of a given person name is useful in various web related tasks such as information retrieval, sentiment analysis, personal name disambiguation, and relation extraction. We propose a method to extract aliases of a given personal name from the web. Given a personal name, the proposed method first extracts a set of candidate aliases. Second, we rank the extracted candidates according to the likelihood of a candidate being a correct alias of the given name. We propose a novel, automatically extracted lexical pattern-based approach to efficiently extract a large set of candidate aliases from snippets retrieved from a web search engine. We define numerous ranking scores to evaluate candidate aliases using three approaches: lexical pattern frequency, word co-occurrences in an anchor text graph, and page counts on the web. To construct a robust alias detection system, we integrate the different ranking scores into a single ranking function using ranking support vector machines. We evaluate the proposed method on three data sets: an English personal names data set, an English place names data set, and a Japanese personal names data set. The proposed method outperforms numerous baselines and previously proposed name alias extraction methods, achieving a statistically significant mean reciprocal rank (MRR) of 0.67. Experiments carried out using location names and Japanese personal names suggest the possibility of extending the proposed method to extract aliases for different types of named entities, and for different languages. Moreover, the aliases extracted using the proposed method are successfully utilized in an information retrieval task and improve recall by 20 percent in a relation-detection task.