A Nominal Filter for Web Search Snippets: Using the Web to Identify Members of Latin America's Highly Qualified Diaspora

This paper presents efforts aimed at using Natural Language Engineering (NLE) techniques for evaluating the impact of talent mobility on the development of three Latin American countries: Argentina, Colombia and Uruguay. We explain the different steps of a research program aimed at carrying out what we call a Mobility Trace Extraction Task. The first step enriches traditional person name disambiguation queries with Social Identity Markers (SIMs) extracted from the bibliographic records of the Web of Science database. The coherence of the snippets retrieved using this SIM-enriched Web search strategy is automatically verified by applying nominal filters based on a context-free grammar to eliminate those snippets which do not respect valid variations of personal names. Finally, the filtered results are ordered and presented to social scientists in a way which allows them to decide if they want to contact and interview a person or not. Our goal is to produce a computer supported infrastructure for doing this type of sociological research using data from the Web.