Repurposing Holocaust-Related Digital Scholarly Editions to Develop Multilingual Domain-Specific Named Entity Recognition Tools

Maria Dermentzi, Hugo Scheithauer


Abstract
The European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) aims to support Holocaust research by making information about dispersed Holocaust material accessible and interconnected through its services. Creating a tool capable of detecting named entities in texts such as Holocaust testimonies or archival descriptions would make it easier to link more material with relevant identifiers in domain-specific controlled vocabularies, semantically enriching it, and making it more discoverable. With this paper, we release EHRI-NER, a multilingual dataset (Czech, German, English, French, Hungarian, Dutch, Polish, Slovak, Yiddish) for Named Entity Recognition (NER) in Holocaust-related texts. EHRI-NER is built by aggregating all the annotated documents in the EHRI Online Editions and converting them to a format suitable for training NER models. We leverage this dataset to fine-tune the multilingual Transformer-based language model XLM-RoBERTa (XLM-R) to determine whether a single model can be trained to recognize entities across different document types and languages. The results of our experiments show that despite our relatively small dataset, in a multilingual experiment setup, the overall F1 score achieved by XLM-R fine-tuned on multilingual annotations is 81.5%. We argue that this score is sufficiently high to consider the next steps towards deploying this model.
Anthology ID:
2024.htres-1.3
Volume:
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Holocaust Testimonies as Language Resources (HTRes) @ LREC-COLING 2024
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Isuri Anuradha, Martin Wynne, Francesca Frontini, Alistair Plum
Venues:
htres | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
18–28
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.htres-1.3
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Maria Dermentzi and Hugo Scheithauer. 2024. Repurposing Holocaust-Related Digital Scholarly Editions to Develop Multilingual Domain-Specific Named Entity Recognition Tools. In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Holocaust Testimonies as Language Resources (HTRes) @ LREC-COLING 2024, pages 18–28, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Repurposing Holocaust-Related Digital Scholarly Editions to Develop Multilingual Domain-Specific Named Entity Recognition Tools (Dermentzi & Scheithauer, htres-WS 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.htres-1.3.pdf