Who Was Where When? AI Tries to Remember History
Archive work has a very simple-looking question at its center: who was where, and when? That question looks harmless until a machine has to answer it from a century-old newspaper, after OCR has mangled the spelling, the place names have shifted, the language is not always English, and the text only implies the answer through an event, job title, or institutional affiliation. At that point, “extracting information” becomes less like copying a fact from a sentence and more like making a legally cautious inference from a witness who speaks in fragments. ...