Tell me what you do and I'll tell you what you are

Biography creation requires the identification of important events in the life of the individual in question. While there are events such as birth and death that apply to everyone, most of the other activities tend to be occupation-specific. Hence, occupation gives important clues as to which activities should be included in the biography. We present techniques for automatically identifying which important events apply to the general population, which ones are occupation-specific, and which ones are person-specific. We use the extracted information as features for a multi-class SVM classifier, which is then used to automatically identify the occupation of a previously unseen individual. We present experiments involving 189 individuals from ten occupations, and we show that our approach accurately identifies general and occupation-specific activities and assigns unseen individuals to the correct occupations. Finally, we present evidence that our technique can lead to efficient and effective biography generation relying only on statistical techniques.