BiographyNet: Methodological Issues when NLP supports historical research

Antske Fokkens, Serge ter Braake, Niels Ockeloen, Piek Vossen, Susan Legêne, Guus Schreiber


Abstract
When NLP is used to support research in the humanities, new methodological issues come into play. NLP methods may introduce a bias in their analysis that can influence the results of the hypothesis a humanities scholar is testing. This paper addresses this issue in the context of BiographyNet a multi-disciplinary project involving NLP, Linked Data and history. We introduce the project to the NLP community. We argue that it is essential for historians to get insight into the provenance of information, including how information was extracted from text by NLP tools.
Anthology ID:
L14-1078
Volume:
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)
Month:
May
Year:
2014
Address:
Reykjavik, Iceland
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
3728–3735
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/1103_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Antske Fokkens, Serge ter Braake, Niels Ockeloen, Piek Vossen, Susan Legêne, and Guus Schreiber. 2014. BiographyNet: Methodological Issues when NLP supports historical research. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14), pages 3728–3735, Reykjavik, Iceland. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
BiographyNet: Methodological Issues when NLP supports historical research (Fokkens et al., LREC 2014)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/1103_Paper.pdf