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.