Development of a text retrieval and mining system for Taiwanese historical people

Personage is an important kind of entities in study of history. Comprehensive understanding of personage biographies is beneficial for researching into historical events. This article introduces the development of a text retrieval and mining system for Taiwanese historical people — Taiwan Biographical Database (TBDB). It describes the characteristics of personages in TBDB, highlights the system architecture and preliminary achievement of TBDB, and proposes a method to recognize named entities in the personage biographies, specifically poetry societies, which achieves the recall rate 96% and the precision rate 65%. Finally, this article elaborates on the lessons learned through the creation of TBDB, and the future plans.