# Named Entity Evolution Analysis on Wikipedia

## TL;DR

This paper analyzes Wikipedia to understand how named entities evolve over time, focusing on name changes, to improve information retrieval and track entity evolution in web archives.

## Contribution

It provides statistical analysis of entity name changes in Wikipedia, laying groundwork for future methods to detect and utilize entity evolution in texts.

## Key findings

- Statistical data on entity name changes in Wikipedia
- Insights into temporal characteristics of entity evolution
- Foundation for future extraction of evolution knowledge

## Abstract

Accessing Web archives raises a number of issues caused by their temporal characteristics. Additional knowledge is needed to find and understand older texts. Especially entities mentioned in texts are subject to change. Most severe in terms of information retrieval are name changes. In order to find entities that have changed their name over time, search engines need to be aware of this evolution. We tackle this problem by analyzing Wikipedia in terms of entity evolutions mentioned in articles. We present statistical data on excerpts covering name changes, which will be used to discover similar text passages and extract evolution knowledge in future work.