An unsupervised method for author extraction from web pages containing user-generated content

In this paper, we address the problem of author extraction (AE) from user generated content (UGC) pages. Most existing solutions for web information extraction, including AE, adopt supervised approaches, which require expensive manual annotation. We propose a novel unsupervised approach for automatically collecting and labeling training data based on two key observations of author names: (1) people tend to use a single name across sites if their preferred names are available; (2) people tend to create unique usernames to easily distinguish themselves from others, e.g. travelbug61. Our AE solution only requires features extracted from a single UGC page instead of relying on clues from multiple UGC pages. We conducted extensive experiments. (1) The evaluation of automatically labeled author field data shows 95.0% precision. (2) Our method achieves an F1 score of 96.1%, which significantly outperforms a state-of-the-art supervised approach with single page features (F1 score: 68.4%) and has a comparable performance to its multiple page solution (F1 score: 95.4%). (3) We also examine the robustness of our approach on various UGC pages from forums and review sites, and achieve promising results as well.