Automatic Reconstruction of Emperor Itineraries from the Regesta Imperii

Abstract

Historic itinerary research investigates the traveling paths of historic entities, to determine their influence and reach. A potential source of such information are the Regesta Imperii (RI), a large-scale resource for European medieval history research. However, two important intermediate problems must be addressed: 1. place names may be stated as unknown or are left empty; 2., place name queries return large candidate sets of points scattered all across Europe and the correct point must be selected. For 1., we perform a place name completion step to predict place names for regests referencing charters of unknown origin. To address 2., we formulate a graph framework which allows efficient reconstruction of the emperors' itineraries by means of shortest path finding algorithms. Our experiments show that our method predicts coordinates of places with significant correlation to human gold coordinates and significantly outperforms a baseline which selects points randomly from the candidate sets. We further show that the method can be leveraged to detect errors in human coordinate labels of place names.