People and Places of Historical Europe: Bootstrapping Annotation Pipeline and a New Corpus of Named Entities in Late Medieval Texts

Vit Novotny, Kristina Luger, Michal Štefánik, Tereza Vrabcova, Ales Horak


Abstract
Although pre-trained named entity recognition (NER) models are highly accurate on modern corpora, they underperform on historical texts due to differences in language OCR errors. In this work, we develop a new NER corpus of 3.6M sentences from late medieval charters written mainly in Czech, Latin, and German.We show that we can start with a list of known historical figures and locations and an unannotated corpus of historical texts, and use information retrieval techniques to automatically bootstrap a NER-annotated corpus. Using our corpus, we train a NER model that achieves entity-level Precision of 72.81–93.98% with 58.14–81.77% Recall on a manually-annotated test dataset. Furthermore, we show that using a weighted loss function helps to combat class imbalance in token classification tasks. To make it easy for others to reproduce and build upon our work, we publicly release our corpus, models, and experimental code.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-acl.887
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
14104–14113
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.887
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.887
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Vit Novotny, Kristina Luger, Michal Štefánik, Tereza Vrabcova, and Ales Horak. 2023. People and Places of Historical Europe: Bootstrapping Annotation Pipeline and a New Corpus of Named Entities in Late Medieval Texts. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023, pages 14104–14113, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
People and Places of Historical Europe: Bootstrapping Annotation Pipeline and a New Corpus of Named Entities in Late Medieval Texts (Novotny et al., Findings 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.887.pdf