HaCohen-Kerner, Y; Mughaz, D. 2010. Estimating the Birth and Death Years of Authors of Undated Documents Using Undated Citations. ADVANCES IN NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING 6233: 138-149

[Eugene Garfield]

HaCohen-Kerner, Y; Mughaz, D. 2010. Estimating the Birth and Death Years of 
Authors of Undated Documents Using Undated Citations. ADVANCES IN 
NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING 6233: 138-149. edited by Loftsson, H; 
Rognvaldsson, E; Helgadottir, S.presented at 7th International Conference on 
Natural Language Processing in Reykjavik, ICELAND, AUG 16-18, 2010.

Author Full Name(s): HaCohen-Kerner, Yaakov; Mughaz, Dror
Book series title: Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence
Language: English
Document Type: Proceedings Paper

Author Keywords: Citation analysis; Hebrew; Hebrew-Aramaic documents; 
knowledge discovery; time analysis; undated citations; undated documents

Abstract: Precious historical treasures might be hidden between the lines of a 
text. There are many implicit details which can be extracted from a text, 
particularly if one has access to an entire corpus of texts pertaining to the 
given subject. One of these details is the identification of the era in which the 
author of the given document(s) lived. For rabbinic documents written in 
Hebrew and Aramaic, which are almost without exception undated and do not 
contain any bibliographic section, this problem is extremely important. The aim 
of this novel research is to find in which years an author was born and died, 
based on his documents and the documents of other authors (whose birth and 
death years are known) who refer to the author under discussion or are 
mentioned by him. Such estimates can help determine the time frame in which 
certain documents were written and in some cases identify an anonymous 
author. In the framework of this research, we formulate various kinds of "iron-
clad", heuristic and greedy constraints defining the birth and death years of an 
author based on citations referring to him or mentioned by him. Experiments 
applied on a corpus containing texts composed by rabbinic authors show 
reasonable results.

Addresses: [HaCohen-Kerner, Yaakov; Mughaz, Dror] Jerusalem Coll Technol, 
Dept Comp Sci, IL-91160 Jerusalem, Israel
Reprint Address: HaCohen-Kerner, Y, Jerusalem Coll Technol, Dept Comp Sci, 
IL-91160 Jerusalem, Israel.

E-mail Address: kerner at jct.ac.il; myghaz at cs.biu.ac.il
ISSN: 0302-9743
ISBN: 978-3-642-14769-2
fulltext: http://www.springerlink.com/content/44r0182n9u282420/