Analysis, Inference, and Visualization of Social Networks

• US 20090164431A1
• Filed: 12/10/2008
• Published: 06/25/2009
• Est. Priority Date: 12/10/2007
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Highground Technologies Corporation
• Original Assignee: Sprylogics International, Inc. (Bragg Gaming Group, Inc.)
• Inventors: Shachar, Avichai, Zivkovic, Aleksandar
• Granted Patent: US 8,862,622 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 1/1
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/9535 Search customisation based on user profiles and personalisation
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/284 Lexical analysis, e.g. tokenisation or collocates
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/295 Named entity recognition
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 7/24 Sorting, i.e. extracting data from one or more carriers, rearranging the data in numerical or other ordered sequence, and rerecording the sorted data on the original carrier or on a different carrier or set of carriers sorting methods in generalG06F7/36 takes precedence
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 10/10 Office automation; Time management

Abstract

A method and system for automated generation of social networks. A graphical user interface receives a user query for an entity of interest, and outputs a graphical network showing entities and associations related to the entity of interest. A search engine interface transmits the query to a search engine, and receives references to documents. A named entity extractor downloads a selection of the documents, and generates a list of named entities referenced in the downloaded documents. A network inference module receives each list of named entities, and generates associations between the named entities in each list. An entity matcher operates on the associations to consolidate them in instances wherein differently named entities are determined to be the same named entity, and provides a consolidated list of named entities and associations to the user interface for display as a graphical network.

Claims

1. A computer implemented system for inferring and analyzing social networks, the system comprising:

a graphical user interface that receives from a user a query for an entity of interest as an input to the system, and that provides to the user as an output from the system in response to the query a graphical network of entities and associations related to the entity of interest;

a search engine interface, coupled to the graphical user interface, that transmits over a network the query to a search engine, and that receives over the network from the search engine references to a plurality of digitally encoded documents in response to the query;

a named entity extractor, coupled to the search engine interface, that receives the references to the plurality of documents and downloads over the network a selection of the documents, and that generates a digitally encoded list of named entities referenced in the downloaded documents;

a network inference module, coupled to the named entity extractor, that receives each list of named entities, and that generates digitally encoded associations between the named entities in each list; and

an entity matcher, coupled to the network inference module and the graphical user interface, that operates on the associations generated by the network inference module so as to consolidate them in instances wherein differently named entities are determined to be the same named entity, and that provides a resulting consolidated digitally encoded list of named entities and associations to the graphical user interface for display as the graphical network.

2. A system according to claim 1, further comprising a risk evaluator, coupled to the entity matcher, that uses a digital process to evaluate a risk factor for the entity of interest.

3. A system according to claim 1, wherein the entity of interest is selected from the group consisting of a person, a company, a location, an event, a date and a phone number.

4. A system according to claim 1, wherein the associations between the entities are selected from the group consisting of a family relationship, a business partnership, ownership, a legal relationship and a financial relationship.

5. A system according to claim 1, wherein the search engine is an Internet search engine, and wherein the plurality of documents is a plurality of web documents.

6. A method for a computer implemented system for inferring and analyzing social networks, the method comprising:

receiving via a graphical user interface a query for an entity of interest;

transmitting the query over a network to a search engine;

receiving over the network references from the search engine to a plurality of digitally encoded documents related to the entity of interest in response to the query;

downloading over the network a selection of the documents;

generating named entities from the downloaded documents;

generating digitally encoded associations between the named entities in the downloaded documents;

using a digital process to consolidate the associations in instances wherein differently named entities are determined to be the same named entity; and

causing display of a graphical network showing the named entities generated from the downloaded documents, and the associations between the named entities.

7. A method according to claim 6, further comprising computing a risk factor for the entity of interest based on the named entities and the associations between the named entities.

8. A method according to claim 6, wherein the entity of interest is selected from the group consisting of a person, a company, a location, an event, a date and a phone number.

9. A method according to claim 6, wherein the associations between the entities are selected from the group consisting of a family relationship, a business partnership, ownership, a legal relationship and a financial relationship.

10. A method according to claim 6, wherein the search engine is an Internet search engine, and wherein the plurality of documents is a plurality of web documents.

11. A computer implemented method for computing a risk factor for an entity of interest, comprising:

retrieving a digitally encoded and stored social network of entities related to an entity of interest, and associations between such entities, wherein the social network is derived from digitally encoded documents downloaded from a network in response to a query over the network for the entity of interest to a search engine, the social network represented by a digitally encoded graph whose vertices are entities and whose edges are associations between entities; and

in a digital process, deriving a risk factor for the entity of interest comprising summing contributions from individual paths comprising one or more associations that traverse the graph from the entity of interest to each of the entities related thereto.

12. A method according to claim 11 wherein said summing comprises summing contributions from individual paths comprising no more than a specified number of associations.

13. A method according to claim 11 wherein the contribution from an individual path depends on the number of associations that comprise the path.

14. A method according to claim 11 wherein the contribution from an individual path depends on a known intrinsic risk of the related entity at the end of the path.

15. A method according to claim 11 wherein the contribution from an individual path depends on the nature of each association comprising the path.

16. A computer implemented method for analyzing differently named entities, comprising:

downloading over a network two digitally encoded documents which each refer to differently named entities;

for each of the two documents, deriving social contexts of the differently named entities based on information in the documents;

comparing the derived social contexts for overlap; and

determining that the differently named entities refer to the same entity based on the results of said comparing if the overlap is greater than a predetermined threshold.

17. A computer program product for inferring and analyzing social networks, the computer program product comprising a computer usable medium having computer readable program code thereon, the computer readable program code comprising:

program code for receiving via a graphical user interface a query for an entity of interest;

program code for causing transmitting the query over a network to a search engine;

program code for receiving over the network references from the search engine to a plurality of documents related to the entity of interest in response to the query;

program code for causing downloading over the network a selection of the documents;

program code for generating named entities from the downloaded documents;

program code for generating associations between the named entities in the downloaded documents;

program code for consolidating the associations in instances wherein differently named entities are determined to be the same named entity; and

program code for causing display via the graphical user interface of a graphical network showing the named entities generated from the downloaded documents, and the associations between the named entities.

18. A computer program product according to claim 17, further comprising program code for computing a risk factor for the entity of interest based on the named entities and the associations between the named entities.