Gender and Animacy Knowledge Discovery from Web-Scale N-Grams for Unsupervised Person Mention Detection

In this paper we present a simple approach to discover gender and animacy knowledge for person mention detection. We learn noun-gender and noun-animacy pair counts from web-scale n-grams using specific lexical patterns, and then apply confidence estimation metrics to filter noise. The selected informative pairs are then used to detect person mentions from raw texts in an unsupervised learning framework. Experiments showed that this approach can achieve high performance comparable to state-of-the-art supervised learning methods which require manually annotated corpora and gazetteers.