Assigning Vocation-Related Information to Person Clusters for Web People Search Results

Distinguishing people with identical names is becoming more and more important in searches on the Web. This research assigns useful labels to help users select person clusters that are separated into different people from the result of person searches on the Web. We proposed a method to label person clusters with vocation-related information (VRI). VRI includes broader terms that may not be considered vocations as well as terms that are useful to infer vocations, not only those rigorously defined as vocations. Our method is comprised of two processes: (a) extraction of VRI candidates using HTML structure and heuristics, and (b) VRI generation using term frequency, clustering synonyms, and calculation using a Web search engine. Experimental results revealed the usefulness of our proposed method.