Multilingual person name recognition and transliteration

We present an exploratory tool that extracts person names from multilingual news collections, matches name variants referring to the same person, and infers relationships between people based on the co-occurrence of their names in related news. A novel feature is the matching of name variants across languages and writing systems, including names written with the Greek, Cyrillic and Arabic writing system. Due to our highly multilingual setting, we use an internal standard representation for name representation and matching, instead of adopting the traditional bilingual approach to transliteration. This work is part of the news analysis system NewsExplorer that clusters an average of 25,000 news articles per day to detect related news within the same and across different languages.