The evolution of named entities affects exploration and retrieval tasks in digital libraries. An information retrieval system that is aware of name changes can actively support users in finding former occurrences of evolved entities. However, current structured knowledge bases, such as DBpedia or Freebase, do not provide enough information about evolutions, even though the data is available on their resources, like Wikipedia. Our Evolution Base prototype will demonstrate how excerpts describing name evolutions can be identified on these websites with a promising precision. The descriptions are classified by means of models that we trained based on a recent analysis of named entity evolutions on Wikipedia.
You can access the demonstration here: http://evobase.L3S.de/DL2014_demo/
Please also visit our demonstration at the Digital Libraries 2014 conference (DL2014), 8th-12th September 2014 in London.
The work in this project is funded by the