Harvesting Entity-relation Social Networks from the Web: Potential and Challenges

We describe a graph-based entity profiling system (GBEP) that extracts information about persons of interest from the Web and uses this information to construct a joint social graph. GBEP then employs graph-based measures to assess inter-personal relatedness, performing social recommendation. Importantly, GBEP provides detailed explanations for its suggestions in the form of relational connecting paths. Initial positive results were obtained for recommending related conference participants to each other using a joint social graph constructed for this purpose.