Language-Independent Set Expansion of Named Entities Using the Web

Set expansion refers to expanding a given partial set of objects into a more complete set. A well-known example system that does set expansion using the web is Google Sets. In this paper, we propose a novel method for expanding sets of named entities. The approach can be applied to semi-structured documents written in any markup language and in any human language. We present experimental results on 36 benchmark sets in three languages, showing that our system is superior to Google Sets in terms of mean average precision.