Large-scale data harvesting for biographical data

Abstract

This paper explores automatic methods to identify relevant biography candidates in large databases, and extract biographical information from encyclopedia entries and databases. In this work, relevant candidates are defined as people who have made an impact in a certain country or region within a pre-defined time frame. We investigate the case of people who had an impact in the Republic of Austria and died between 1951 and 2019. We use Wikipedia and Wikidata as data sources and compare the performance of our information extraction methods on these two databases. We demonstrate the usefulness of a natural language processing pipeline to identify suitable biography candidates and, in a second stage, extract relevant information about them. Even though they are considered by many as an identical resource, our results show that the data from Wikipedia and Wikidata differs in some cases and they can be used in a complementary way providing more data for the compilation of biographies.