Building a graph of persons
We previously used NLP entity recognition to identify persons from an HTML raw text format. In this chapter, we move to a lower level by trying to infer relations between these entities and detect the possible communities surrounding them.
Contact chaining
Within the context of news articles, we first need to ask ourselves a fundamental question. What defines a relation between two entities? The most elegant answer would probably be to study words using the Stanford NLP libraries described in Chapter 6, Scraping Link-Based External Data. Given the following input sentence, which is taken from http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/david-bowie-yoko-ono-says-starmans-death-has-left-big-empty-space-1545160:
"Yoko Ono said she and late husband John Lennon shared a close relationship with David Bowie"
We could easily extract the syntactic tree, a structure that linguists use to model how sentences are grammatically built and where each element is reported with its type such as a noun...