Country of origin determination via Web mining techniques

The origin of a music artist or a band is an important kind of musical meta-data as it usually influences his/her/its music. In this paper, we propose three approaches to automatically determine the country of origin of a person or institution, which we apply to music artists and bands. The first approach investigates estimates of page counts returned for specific queries to Web search engines. The second approach uses term weighting functions for country-specific terms that occur on the top-ranked Web pages of an artist. The third approach applies to Web pages text distance measures between country-specific terms and key terms related to the concept or origin. We further present a thorough evaluation of the approaches taking into consideration different refinements. We show that we are able to outperform the first, nevertheless recent, approach to determine the origin of a music artist.