# Extraction of Evolution Descriptions from the Web

## TL;DR

This paper presents a method to extract and classify descriptions of named entity evolutions from web sources like Wikipedia to improve digital library search capabilities.

## Contribution

It introduces the Evolution Base prototype that identifies and classifies evolution descriptions, addressing gaps in structured knowledge bases.

## Key findings

- High precision in identifying evolution excerpts
- Effective classification of evolution descriptions
- Potential to enhance digital library search

## Abstract

The evolution of named entities affects exploration and retrieval tasks in digital libraries. An information retrieval system that is aware of name changes can actively support users in finding former occurrences of evolved entities. However, current structured knowledge bases, such as DBpedia or Freebase, do not provide enough information about evolutions, even though the data is available on their resources, like Wikipedia. Our \emph{Evolution Base} prototype will demonstrate how excerpts describing name evolutions can be identified on these websites with a promising precision. The descriptions are classified by means of models that we trained based on a recent analysis of named entity evolutions on Wikipedia.