Contrastive Entity Coreference and Disambiguation for Historical Texts
Abhishek Arora, Emily Silcock, Melissa Dell, Leander Heldring
Abstract
Massive-scale historical document collections are crucial for social science research. Despite increasing digitization, these documents typically lack unique cross-document identifiers for individuals mentioned within the texts, as well as individual identifiers from external knowledge bases like Wikipedia/Wikidata. Existing entity disambiguation methods often fall short in accuracy for historical documents, which are replete with individuals not remembered in contemporary knowledge bases. This study makes three key contributions to improve cross-document coreference resolution and disambiguation in historical texts: a massive-scale training dataset replete with hard negatives - that sources over 190 million entity pairs from Wikipedia contexts and disambiguation pages - high-quality evaluation data from hand-labeled historical newswire articles, and trained models evaluated on this historical benchmark. We contrastively train bi-encoder models for coreferencing and disambiguating individuals in historical texts, achieving accurate, scalable performance that identifies out-of-knowledge base individuals. Our approach significantly surpasses other entity disambiguation models on our historical newswire benchmark. Our models also demonstrate competitive performance on modern entity disambiguation benchmarks, particularly on certain news disambiguation datasets.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{arora-etal-2024-contrastive,
title = "Contrastive Entity Coreference and Disambiguation for Historical Texts",
author = "Arora, Abhishek and
Silcock, Emily and
Dell, Melissa and
Heldring, Leander",
editor = "Al-Onaizan, Yaser and
Bansal, Mohit and
Chen, Yun-Nung",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
month = nov,
year = "2024",
address = "Miami, Florida, USA",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.355/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-main.355",
pages = "6174--6186"
}