Mining history with Le Monde

Abstract

The last decade has seen the rise of large knowledge bases, such as YAGO, DBpedia, Freebase, or NELL. In this paper, we show how this structured knowledge can help understand and mine trends in unstructured data. By combining YAGO with the archive of the French newspaper Le Monde, we can conduct analyses that would not be possible with word frequency statistics alone. We find indications about the increasing role that women play in politics, about the impact that the city of birth can have on a person's career, or about the average age of famous people in different professions.