Dating Texts without Explicit Temporal Cues

This paper tackles temporal resolution of documents, such as determining when a document is about or when it was written, based only on its text. We apply techniques from information retrieval that predict dates via language models over a discretized timeline. Unlike most previous works, we rely {\it solely} on temporal cues implicit in the text. We consider both document-likelihood and divergence based techniques and several smoothing methods for both of them. Our best model predicts the mid-point of individuals' lives with a median of 22 and mean error of 36 years for Wikipedia biographies from 3800 B.C. to the present day. We also show that this approach works well when training on such biographies and predicting dates both for non-biographical Wikipedia pages about specific years (500 B.C. to 2010 A.D.) and for publication dates of short stories (1798 to 2008). Together, our work shows that, even in absence of temporal extraction resources, it is possible to achieve remarkable temporal locality across a diverse set of texts

Pantheon 1.0, a manually verified dataset of globally famous biographies

We present the Pantheon 1.0 dataset: a manually verified dataset of individuals that have transcended linguistic, temporal, and geographic boundaries. The Pantheon 1.0 dataset includes the 11,341 biographies present in more than 25 languages in Wikipedia and is enriched with: (i) manually verified demographic information (place and date of birth, gender) (ii) a taxonomy of occupations classifying each biography at three levels of aggregation and (iii) two measures of global popularity including the number of languages in which a biography is present in Wikipedia (L), and the Historical Popularity Index (HPI) a metric that combines information on L, time since birth, and page-views (2008-2013). We compare the Pantheon 1.0 dataset to data from the 2003 book, Human Accomplishments, and also to external measures of accomplishment in individual games and sports: Tennis, Swimming, Car Racing, and Chess. In all of these cases we find that measures of popularity (L and HPI) correlate highly with individual accomplishment, suggesting that measures of global popularity proxy the historical impact of individuals.Comment: Scientific Data 2:15007

Artequakt: Generating tailored biographies from automatically annotated fragments from the web

The Artequakt project seeks to automatically generate narrativebiographies of artists from knowledge that has been extracted from the Web and maintained in a knowledge base. An overview of the system architecture is presented here and the three key components of that architecture are explained in detail, namely knowledge extraction, information management and biography construction. Conclusions are drawn from the initial experiences of the project and future progress is detailed

Web based knowledge extraction and consolidation for automatic ontology instantiation

The Web is probably the largest and richest information repository available today. Search engines are the common access routes to this valuable source. However, the role of these search engines is often limited to the retrieval of lists of potentially relevant documents. The burden of analysing the returned documents and identifying the knowledge of interest is therefore left to the user. The Artequakt system aims to deploy natural language tools to automatically ex-tract and consolidate knowledge from web documents and instantiate a given ontology, which dictates the type and form of knowledge to extract. Artequakt focuses on the domain of artists, and uses the harvested knowledge to gen-erate tailored biographies. This paper describes the latest developments of the system and discusses the problem of knowledge consolidation

Of Wines and Reviews: Measuring and Modeling the Vivino Wine Social Network

This paper presents an analysis of social experiences around wine consumption through the lens of Vivino, a social network for wine enthusiasts with over 26 million users worldwide. We compare users' perceptions of various wine types and regional styles across both New and Old World wines, examining them across price ranges, vintages, regions, varietals, and blends. Among other things, we find that ratings provided by Vivino users are not biased by cost. We then study how wine characteristics, language in wine reviews, and the distribution of wine ratings can be combined to develop prediction models. More specifically, we model user behavior to develop a regression model for predicting wine ratings, and a classifier for determining user review preferences.Comment: A preliminary version of this paper appears in the Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM 2018). This is the full versio

The biographical construction of Robert Fergusson, 1774-1900

This article traces the biographical construction of Robert Fergusson from his death to the nineteenth-century biography by A.B. Grosart. It explores the influence of Romanticism, the Burns cult and the literature of sensibility on the construction of Fergusson's life, and explores some fictional representations of the poet

Life without theory: biography as an exemplar of philosophical understanding

This article discusses recent attempts to provide the genre of biography with a philosophical, theoretical foundation and attempts to show that such efforts are fundamentally misguided. Biography is, I argue, a profoundly nontheoretical activity, and this, precisely, makes it philosophically interesting. Instead of looking to philosophy to provide a theory of biography, we should, I maintain, look to biography to provide a crucially important example and model of what Ludwig Wittgenstein called "the kind of understanding that consists in seeing connections." This kind of understanding stands in sharp contrast to the theoretical understanding provided by science and is, Wittgenstein maintained, what we as philosophers are, or should be, striving for

Douglass, Malcolm Paul

University of California, Los Angeles, English, Ph.D. 1981 Claremont Graduate University, Education, MA 1976 Amherst College, English, BA 1974https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/erfa_bios/1288/thumbnail.jp