Multilingual Event Extraction from Historical Newspaper Adverts

NLP methods can aid historians in analyzing textual materials in greater volumes than manually feasible. Developing such methods poses substantial challenges though. First, acquiring large, annotated historical datasets is difficult, as only domain experts can reliably label them. Second, most available off-the-shelf NLP models are trained on modern language texts, rendering them significantly less effective when applied to historical corpora. This is particularly problematic for less well studied tasks, and for languages other than English. This paper addresses these challenges while focusing on the under-explored task of event extraction from a novel domain of historical texts. We introduce a new multilingual dataset in English, French, and Dutch composed of newspaper ads from the early modern colonial period reporting on enslaved people who liberated themselves from enslavement. We find that: 1) even with scarce annotated data, it is possible to achieve surprisingly good results by formulating the problem as an extractive QA task and leveraging existing datasets and models for modern languages; and 2) cross-lingual low-resource learning for historical languages is highly challenging, and machine translation of the historical datasets to the considered target languages is, in practice, often the best-performing solution. RUn away from a Ship in the Port of Weymouth, belonging to Dorchester, Mr William Ward Commander, bound for Newfoundland, Philip Mardery a Negro, Aged 22 years middle Sized Man, with a Close Bodied Frize Coat Lined, Buttons of the same, a small Cape, a great Coat not Lined, with Blew Shirts fitting for the Sea; All Gentlemen Captains, or Masters of Ships, that shall happen to have any such offered to them, as a Servant, are desired to give notice to Mr. Walters Grocer in Westminster; or to Mr. Killman Apothecary in Sarum; or to Mr. Turner, at his Coffee House in Dorchester, and they shall be well rewarded with Charges a) b) Newspaper title Post Boy (1695) Newspaper date 11 April 1700 Given name Philip Given surname Mardery Racial descriptor Negro Clothing a Close Bodied Frize Coat Lined, Buttons of the same, a small Cape, a great Coat not Lined, with Blew Shirts fitting for the Sea Contact address Westminster; Sarum; at his Coffee House in Dorchester Total reward well rewarded with Charges c)