Towards a Local Grammar-based Persondata Generator for Wikipedia Biographies

Finding information about people in the World Wide Web is one of the most common activities of Internet users. It is now impossible to manually analyze all this information and new approaches are needed that are capable of processing the large-scale heterogeneous data in order to extract the pertinent information. The Wikipedia community still puts much effort in manually adding structured data to biographical articles, the so-called {{Persondata}} template. Thanks to this kind of metadata, semantically-enriched information concerning the biographee (e.g. name, date of birth, place of birth) can be extracted and processed by search engines. But it is a rather time-consuming task and users quite often forget to add this template: some biographies contain persondata, others do not. There is considerably less work done on developing approaches to automatically enhance English Wikipedia biographies with persondata and therefore improve the quality of structured user contributions. Within this paper, we describe our method to automatically generate persondata from biographical information in Wikipedia articles.