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Who Are My Ancestors? Retrieving Family Relationships from Historical Texts

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Information Retrieval (RuSSIR 2015)

Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 573))

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Abstract

This paper presents an approach for automatically retrieving family relationships from a real-world collection of Dutch historical notary acts. We aim to retrieve relationships like husband - wife, parent - child, widow of, etc. Our approach includes person names extraction, reference disambiguation, candidate generation and family relationship prediction. Since we have a limited amount of training data, we evaluate different feature configurations based on the n-gram analysis. The best results were obtained by using a combination of bi-grams and tri-grams of words together with the distance in words between two names. We evaluate our results for each type of the relationships in terms of precision, recall and \(f-score\).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://goo.gl/leibR9.

  2. 2.

    http://www.meertens.knaw.nl/nvb/.

  3. 3.

    ‘Kerk van Erp’ in Dutch means ‘church of Erp’.

  4. 4.

    http://scikit-learn.org/.

  5. 5.

    http://wwwis.win.tue.nl/amontes/ecir2015/results.html.

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Acknowledgements

Mining Social Structures from Genealogical Data (project no. 640.005.003) project, part of the CATCH program funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

    Julia Efremova, Alejandro Montes García, Alfredo Bolt Iriondo & Toon Calders

  2. Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium

    Toon Calders

Authors
  1. Julia Efremova
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  2. Alejandro Montes García
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  3. Alfredo Bolt Iriondo
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  4. Toon Calders
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Julia Efremova .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Ural Federal University , Yekaterinburg, Russia

    Pavel Braslavski

  2. University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Ilya Markov

  3. University of Florida , Gainsville, Florida, USA

    Panos Pardalos

  4. Eurecat , Barcelona, Spain

    Yana Volkovich

  5. National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia

    Dmitry I. Ignatov

  6. National Research University Higher School of Economics, Saint Petersburg, Russia

    Sergei Koltsov

  7. National Research University Higher School of Economics, Saint Petersburg, Russia

    Olessia Koltsova

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Efremova, J., García, A.M., Iriondo, A.B., Calders, T. (2016). Who Are My Ancestors? Retrieving Family Relationships from Historical Texts. In: Braslavski, P., et al. Information Retrieval. RuSSIR 2015. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 573. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-41718-9_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-41718-9_6

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