Abstract
The main application of name searching has been name matching in a database of names. This chapter discusses a different application: improving information retrieval through name recognition. It investigates name recognition accuracy, and the effect on retrieval performance of indexing and searching personal names differently from non-name terms in the context of ranked retrieval. The main conclusions are: that name recognition in text can be effective; that names occur frequently enough in a variety of domains, including those of legal documents and news databases, to make recognition worthwhile; and that retrieval performance can be improved using name searching.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Bikel, D. M., Miller, S.; Schwartz, R., and Weischedel, R. (1997) Nymble: a highperformance learning name-finder In Proceedings of the Fifth Conference on Applied Natural Language Processing, 31 March–3 April 1997, Washington, DC, pp. 194–201.
Borgman, C. L. and Siegfried, S. L. (1992) Getty’s Synoname and its cousins: A survey of applications of personal name-matching algorithms Journal of the American Society of Information Science, 43 (7), pp. 459–476.
Carroll, J. M. (1985) What’s in a name? An essay in the psychology of reference. W. H. Freeman, New York.
Fuhr, N. (1996) Object-oriented and database concepts for the design of networked information retrieval systems In Barker, K. and Ozsu, M. T. (eds.) Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management 96, pp. 164–172.
Harman, D. K. (ed.) (1996) The Fourth Text REtrieval Conference (TREC-4),NIST Special Publication 500–236.
Hayes, P. (1994) NameFinder: software that finds names in text Proceedings RIAO 94, 1, 11–13 October, New York pp. 76 2–774.
Hermansen, J. C. (1985) Automatic name searching in large data bases of international names. Ph.D. thesis Georgetown University.
Hickey, T. B. (1981) Development of a probabilistic author search and matching technique for retrieval and creation of bibliographic records OCLC Office of Planning and Research.
Jing, Y. and Croft, W. B. (1994) An association thesaurus for information retrieval Proceedings RIAO 94, New York, pp. 146–160.
Krupka, G. (1995) SRA: Description of the SRA system as used for MUC-6 Proceedings: Sixth Message Understanding Conference (MUC-6), Columbia, MD, Morgan Kaufmann, pp. 221–235.
Lu, X. A. and Keefer, R. B. (1995) Query expansion/reduction and its impact on retrieval effectiveness In Harman, D.K., (ed.) Overview of the Third Text REtrieval Conference (TREC-3), NIST Special Publication 500–225, pp. 231–239.
NameTag Technical Overview (1996) IsoQuest technical report.
Paik, W., Liddy, E., Yu, E., McKenna, M. (1993) Categorizing and standardizing proper nouns for efficient information retrieval Proceedings of the Workshop SIGLEX (The Lexicon) held at the Association for Computational Linguistics annual conference.
Palmer, D. D. and Day, D. S. (1997) A statistical profile of the named entity task In Proceedings of the Fifth Conference on Applied Natural Language Processing, Washington, DC, pp. 190–193.
Pfeiffer, U., Poersch, T., Fuhr, N.. (1996) Retrieval effectiveness of proper name search methods Information Processing e4 Management 32 (6), pp. 667–679.
Proceedings: Fourth Message Understanding Conference (MUC-4) (1992) McLean, VA, Morgan Kaufmann.
Proceedings: Sixth Message Understanding Conference (MUC-6) (1995) Columbia, MD, Morgan Kaufmann.
Rau, L. F. (1991) Extracting company names from text Proceedings of the Seventh Conference on Artificial Intelligence Applications.
Turtle, H. R. and Croft, W. B. (1991) Evaluation of an inference network-based retrieval model ACM Transactions on Information Systems 9 (3), pp. 187–222.
Wacholder, N., Ravin, Y., and Choi, M. (1997) Disambiguation of proper names in text In Proceedings of the Fifth Conference on Applied Natural Language Processing, Washington, DC, pp. 202–208.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1999 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Thompson, P., Dozier, C.C. (1999). Name Recognition and Retrieval Performance. In: Strzalkowski, T. (eds) Natural Language Information Retrieval. Text, Speech and Language Technology, vol 7. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2388-6_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2388-6_10
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-5209-4
Online ISBN: 978-94-017-2388-6
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive