Extracting Biographical Spatial Timelines: Corpus and Experiments

Alakananda Vempala, Eduardo Blanco

Abstract: This article presents a corpus and experiments to extract spatial timelines from biographies. Spatial timelines capture where someone is and is not located, and specify when this spatial information is true. We work with 100 Wikipedia biographies, and consider intersentential (location, year) pairs as well as years that are not explicitly stated in the biographies. Experimental results show that a combination of LSTMs outperforms SVM with linguistically motivated features.