Tarikhi: Arabic Temporal Information Extraction from Arabic Historical Documents

Qusay Abdo, Serin Atiani, Tariq Sraiji, Adnan Saeed


Abstract
Arabic historical books and archival materials contain rich accounts of political, social, and cultural events, yet they remain largely underutilized computationally due to the scarcity of dedicated Arabic information extraction tools. The challenge is amplified in long-form, scanned historical documents, where optical character recognition noise, orthographic variation, and complex narrative structures complicate automatic processing. In this paper, we present Tarikhi, a retrieval-augmented generation framework for structured temporal event extraction from Arabic scanned books. The proposed pipeline integrates high-accuracy optical character recognition, chunking-based processing for long-document handling, Arabic named entity recognition, span refinement, and a retrieval-enhanced attribute extraction module that identifies event dates, locations, and descriptive summaries. Extracted events are consolidated and linked using semantic and temporal similarity measures, and linked through relation classification to construct structured temporal events. Evaluation on a selected part of modern Arabic historical books demonstrates the feasibility of temporal event extraction from long-form Arabic texts, achieving a 75.3% F1-score under dual human verification. Tarikhi represents a step toward scalable temporal knowledge construction for Arabic digital humanities resources.
Anthology ID:
2026.nakbanlp-1.6
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Nakba Narratives as Language Resources @ LREC 2026
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma, Mallorca (Spain)
Editors:
Mustafa Jarrar, Mo El-Haj, Amal Haddad, Serin Atiani, Shadi Abudalfa, Terry Regier, Paul Rayson, Khalil Sima’an, Camille Mansour
Venues:
NakbaNLP | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
60–69
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-ws-nakbanlp-06
DOI:
10.63317/5eco9hgcoxp8
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Qusay Abdo, Serin Atiani, Tariq Sraiji, and Adnan Saeed. 2026. Tarikhi: Arabic Temporal Information Extraction from Arabic Historical Documents. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Nakba Narratives as Language Resources @ LREC 2026, pages 60–69, Palma, Mallorca (Spain). ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Tarikhi: Arabic Temporal Information Extraction from Arabic Historical Documents (Abdo et al., NakbaNLP 2026)
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