Automatic Extraction of Archaeological Events from Text
Kate G. Byrne, Ewan Klein · 2009
This paper describes a series of experiments to automatically de-tect and categorise archaeological events—such as survey, excavation, finds and so forth—that are described in natural language text docu-ments. Complex event structures with attributes including date, agent and location are extracted and converted into families of binary rela-tions. These in turn can be mapped to RDF triples for publication as Semantic Web graphs, with the potential of making it dramatically easier to interconnect separate data silos. We present results indicat-ing that although events do not conform to the standard definitions of “entities”, they can be detected with high precision, making large-scale processing of text documents a practical possibility.