Word Occurrence Based Extraction of Work Contributors from Statements of Responsibility

Abstract

This paper addresses the identification of all contributors of an intellectual work, when they are recorded in bibliographic data but in unstructured form. National bibliographies are very reliable on representing the first author of a work, but frequently, secondary contributors are represented in the statements of responsibility that are transcribed by the cataloguer from the book into the bibliographic records. The identification of work contributors mentioned in statements of responsibility is a typical motivation for the application of information extraction techniques. This paper presents an approach developed for the specific application scenario of the ARROW rights infrastructure being deployed in several European countries to assist in the determination of the copyright status of works that may not be under public domain. Our approach performed reliably in most languages and bibliographic datasets of at least one million records, achieving precision and recall above 0.97 on five of the six evaluated datasets. We conclude that the approach can be reliably applied to other national bibliographies and languages.