Mining temporal footprints from Wikipedia

Discovery of temporal information is key for organising knowledge and therefore the task of extracting and representing temporal information from texts has received an increasing interest. In this paper we focus on the discovery of temporal footprints from encyclopaedic descriptions. Temporal footprints are time-line periods that are associated to the existence of specific concepts. Our approach relies on the extraction of date mentions and prediction of lower and upper boundaries that define temporal footprints. We report on several experiments on persons’ pages from Wikipedia in order to illustrate the feasibility of the proposed methods.