Cross-lingual Biography Enrichment via Claim Extraction and Alignment

Yifei Song, Ziyang Chen, Emil Sayilov, Claire Gardent


Abstract
English Wikipedia is often treated as the default encyclopedic source, yet non-English Wikipedia editions can contain richer locally grounded information for long-tail figures. We study cross-lingual biography enrichment: enriching an existing English biography with facts supported by a non-English biography about the same person. Focusing on women from non-English-speaking contexts, we introduce CLAW-4L, a benchmark consisting of 300 Wikipedia biography pairs linking an English biography with its French, Chinese or Azerbaijani counterpart, along with claim annotations and a fine-grained claim-pair relation corpus. We propose a claim-based enrichment framework that extracts English claims from both biographies, aligns them to identify enrichment evidence from the non-English biography, and rewrites the English biography using the selected claims. Our results show that non-English Wikipedia biographies provide valuable evidence for improving English biography coverage, while lower-resource settings remain challenging.
Anthology ID:
2026.emnlp-main.441
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
10145–10195
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.441/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yifei Song, Ziyang Chen, Emil Sayilov, and Claire Gardent. 2026. Cross-lingual Biography Enrichment via Claim Extraction and Alignment. In Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 10145–10195, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Cross-lingual Biography Enrichment via Claim Extraction and Alignment (Song et al., EMNLP 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.441.pdf