Patent ID: 8862622

Claim:
A computer implemented system for inferring social networks, the system comprising: a computer having a hardware microprocessor, the hardware microprocessor being configured to execute: a graphical user interface that receives, from a user, a query relating to an entity of interest other than the user, and that responsively provides, to the user, a graphical network of entities and associations related to the entity of interest; a search engine interface that transmits, over the communication network to a search engine, the query received by the graphical user interface, and that responsively receives, over the communication network from the search engine, search results that refer to a plurality of digitally encoded documents related to the entity of interest; a named entity extractor that downloads, over the communication network, a selection of the referenced digitally encoded documents, and that extracts named entities from the downloaded documents; a network inference module that constructs an inferred network of associations between the extracted named entities from lexical analysis of text of the downloaded documents; and an entity matcher that operates on the associations generated by the network inference module so as to disambiguate differently named entities when the differently named entities are determined to be the same entity, and that provides a resulting list of disambiguated named entities and the network of associations between the disambiguated named entities to the graphical user interface for display as the graphical network; wherein the network inference module operates by: breaking up the text of the downloaded documents into a plurality of sentences; within each sentence in the plurality of sentences, identifying extracted named entities and, when at least two such named entities are within the sentence, identifying a textual association between each pair of the named entities; and storing the extracted named entities and associations as the inferred network.