We study the problem of disambiguating the results of a web people search engine: given a query consisting of a person name plus the result pages for this query, find correct referents for all mentions by clustering the pages according to the different people sharing the name. While the problem has been studied extensively, we discover that the increasing availability of results retrieved from social media platforms causes state-of-the-art methods to break down. We analyze the problem and propose a dual strategy where we distinguish between results obtained from social media platforms and those obtained from other sources. In our dual strategy, the two types of documents are disambiguated separately, using different strategies, and their results are then merged. We study several instantiations for the different stages in our proposed strategy and manage to achieve state-of-the-art performance.

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We propose and motivate a scheme for classifying queries submitted to a people search engine. We specify a number of features for automatically classifying people queries into the proposed classes and examine the effectiveness of these features. Our main finding is that classification is feasible and that using information from past searches, clickouts and news sources is important.