Suranah writeup for Wang and Cohen 2008

This is a review of Wang_2008_iterative_set_expansion_of_named_entities_using_the_web by user:Suranah

The paper discusses some improvements to the general, language independent set expansion system SEAL. The chief issue with SEAL was that it performed poorly when given a large amount of seeds, because it fetched pages which had all of the seeds. iSEAL solves this problem by calling SEAL on various subsets to the seed patterns.

As is fairly obvious this methodology allows one to factor the user feedback into the system. I found this side-effect to be rather interesting, though how it can be exploited to increase the results has not been discussed in this specific paper.