Extracting inter-firm networks from world wide web

Social relations play an important role in a real communities. Interaction patterns reveal relations among actors (such as persons, groups, firms), which can be merged to produce valuable information as a network structure. This paper presents a new approach to extract inter-firm networks from the web for further analysis. Extraction of relations between a pair of firms is realized using a search engine and text processing. Because names of firms co-appear coincidentally on the web, we propose an advanced algorithm, which is characterized by addition of keywords (relation keywords) to a query. The relation keywords are obtained from the web using a Jaccard coefficient. We present some examples and comprehensive evaluations of our approach.