MC4WEPS: a multilingual corpus for Web people search disambiguation

Abstract

This article introduces the MC4WEPS corpus, a new resource for evaluating Web people search disambiguation tasks, and describes its design, collection and annotation process, the agreement between the different annotators, and finally introduces a baseline evaluation. This corpus is built by compiling multilingual search engines results where the queries are person names. Proper noun disambiguation is an open problem in natural language ambiguity resolution and, specifically, resolving the ambiguity of person names in Web search results is still a challenging problem. However, state-of-the-art approaches have been evaluated only with monolingual web page collections. The MC4WEPS corpus aims to provide the research community with a reference corpus for the task of disambiguating search engine results where the query is a person name shared by homonymous individuals. The features of this new corpus stand out from existing corpora for the same task, namely multilingualism and inclusion of social networking websites. These characteristics make it more representative of a real search scenario, especially for evaluating person name disambiguation in a multilingual context. The article also includes detailed information about the format and the availability of the corpus.