I, RE:Claudius 256: Towards Linking Classical Latin Person Mentions to a Domain-specific Knowledge Base

Marijke Beersmans, Evelien de Graaf, Julie Nijs, Valeria Irene Boano, Alek Keersmaekers, Mark Depauw, Tim Van de Cruys, Margherita Fantoli


Abstract
This paper considers Named Entity Linking for person mentions from classical Latin texts to a domain-specific, German language knowledge base, namely Paulys RealencyclopΣdie. Following a methodology similar to (anonymous_reference), we train a transformer-based, retrieval and ranking model (BLINK) first on a general, Wikipedia-derived dataset and subsequently on a more specific dataset, gathered from various sources, linking to our target knowledge base. Results show that while BLINK performs well on mention-entity pairs linked to entities seen during training, it performs significantly worse on mention-entity pairs linking to unseen entities. We provide a detailed error analysis, propose possible exploitation strategies for a human-in-the-loop approach, and identify directions for future improvement.
Anthology ID:
2026.lt4hala-1.14
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Language Technologies for Historical and Ancient Languages (LT4HALA 2026) @ LREC 2026
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma, Mallorca (Spain)
Editors:
Rachele Sprugnoli, Marco Passarotti
Venues:
LT4HALA | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
152–162
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-ws-lt4hala-14
DOI:
10.63317/3db3992kjxgv
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Marijke Beersmans, Evelien de Graaf, Julie Nijs, Valeria Irene Boano, Alek Keersmaekers, Mark Depauw, Tim Van de Cruys, and Margherita Fantoli. 2026. I, RE:Claudius 256: Towards Linking Classical Latin Person Mentions to a Domain-specific Knowledge Base. In Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Language Technologies for Historical and Ancient Languages (LT4HALA 2026) @ LREC 2026, pages 152–162, Palma, Mallorca (Spain). ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
I, RE:Claudius 256: Towards Linking Classical Latin Person Mentions to a Domain-specific Knowledge Base (Beersmans et al., LT4HALA 2026)
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