Who Are My Ancestors? Retrieving Family Relationships from Historical Texts

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 trigrams 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.