mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Named Entity Recognition and Classification on Historical Documents: A Survey

arXiv 2109.11406 ↗First posted 23 Sep 2021cs.CL cs.LGcited by 47

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Abstract (arXiv)

After decades of massive digitisation, an unprecedented amount of historical documents is available in digital format, along with their machine-readable texts. While this represents a major step forward with respect to preservation and accessibility, it also opens up new opportunities in terms of content mining and the next fundamental challenge is to develop appropriate technologies to efficiently search, retrieve and explore information from this 'big data of the past'. Among semantic indexing opportunities, the recognition and classification of named entities are in great demand among humanities scholars. Yet, named entity recognition (NER) systems are heavily challenged with diverse, historical and noisy inputs. In this survey, we present the array of challenges posed by historical documents to NER, inventory existing resources, describe the main approaches deployed so far, and identify key priorities for future developments.

Key facts. Cited by 47 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 36 of its 253 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 23 Sep 2021.

Builds on

36 of 253 references.

References · 36

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Citing papers per year: 2022: 1; 2023: 6; 2024: 11; 2025: 17; 2026: 12.

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  1. 2024Revolutionizing Finance with LLMs: An Overview of Applications and Insightscited by 88
  2. 2024A Survey of Large Language Models for Financial Applications: Progress, Prospects and Challengescited by 86
  3. 2024Large Language Models for UAVs: Current State and Pathways to the Futurecited by 33
  4. 2025AgenticData: An Agentic Data Analytics System for Heterogeneous Datacited by 22
  5. 2024Deep Learning based Visually Rich Document Content Understanding: A Surveycited by 21
  6. 2025Multimodal LLMs for OCR, OCR Post-Correction, and Named Entity Recognition in Historical Documentscited by 12
  7. 2023Yes but.. Can ChatGPT Identify Entities in Historical Documents?cited by 10
  8. 2024ChroniclingAmericaQA: A Large-scale Question Answering Dataset based on Historical American Newspaper Pagescited by 10
  9. 2022Entities, Dates, and Languages: Zero-Shot on Historical Texts with T0cited by 6
  10. 2023Multilingual Event Extraction from Historical Newspaper Advertscited by 5
  11. 2024HistNERo: Historical Named Entity Recognition for the Romanian Languagecited by 5
  12. 2023A Massive Scale Semantic Similarity Dataset of Historical Englishcited by 4
35 more
  1. 2023ConfusionPrompt: Practical Private Inference for Online Large Language Modelscited by 3
  2. 2024Fighting Against the Repetitive Training and Sample Dependency Problem in Few-shot Named Entity Recognitioncited by 3
  3. 2024Reading Order Independent Metrics for Information Extraction in Handwritten Documentscited by 2
  4. 2025HERITAGE: An End-to-End Web Platform for Processing Korean Historical Documents in Hanjacited by 2
  5. 2025Musical Heritage Historical Entity Linkingcited by 2
  6. 2025Evaluating Robustness of LLMs in Question Answering on Multilingual Noisy OCR Datacited by 2
  7. 2025Named Entity Recognition in Historical Italian: The Case of Giacomo Leopardi's Zibaldonecited by 2
  8. 2025Context-Aware Pragmatic Metacognitive Prompting for Sarcasm Detectioncited by 2
  9. 2024Is text normalization relevant for classifying medieval charters?cited by 1
  10. 2025A Review on Large Language Models for Visual Analyticscited by 1
  11. 2025A Comparative Analysis of Word Segmentation, Part-of-Speech Tagging, and Named Entity Recognition for Historical Chinese Sources, 1900-1950cited by 1
  12. 2025Evaluating Named Entity Recognition Models for Russian Cultural News Texts: From BERT to LLMcited by 1
  13. 2025MariNER: A Dataset for Historical Brazilian Portuguese Named Entity Recognitioncited by 1
  14. 2026It's All About the Confidence: An Unsupervised Approach for Multilingual Historical Entity Linking using Large Language Modelscited by 1
  15. 2023People and Places of Historical Europe: Bootstrapping Annotation Pipeline and a New Corpus of Named Entities in Late Medieval Textscited by 0
  16. 2023Transfer Learning across Several Centuries: Machine and Historian Integrated Method to Decipher Royal Secretary's Diarycited by 0
  17. 2024A Novel Method for News Article Event-Based Embeddingcited by 0
  18. 2024Investigating OCR-Sensitive Neurons to Improve Entity Recognition in Historical Documentscited by 0
  19. 2025Building Foundations for Natural Language Processing of Historical Turkish: Resources and Modelscited by 0
  20. 2025Adapting Multilingual Embedding Models to Historical Luxembourgishcited by 0
  21. 2025Creating a Historical Migration Dataset from Finnish Church Records, 1800-1920cited by 0
  22. 2025Named Entity Recognition of Historical Texts via Large Language Modelcited by 0
  23. 2025DELICATE: Diachronic Entity LInking using Classes And Temporal Evidencecited by 0
  24. 2025A Comparative Study of Light-weight Language Models for PII Masking and their Deployment for Real Conversational Textscited by 0
  25. 2026A Dataset for Named Entity Recognition and Relation Extraction from Art-historical Image Descriptionscited by 0
  26. 2026EDDA-Coordinata: An Annotated Dataset of Historical Geographic Coordinatescited by 0
  27. 2026ENEIDE: A High Quality Silver Standard Dataset for Named Entity Recognition and Linking in Historical Italiancited by 0
  28. 2026Rethinking Publication: A Certification Framework for AI-Enabled Researchcited by 0
  29. 2026ATLAS: Article Tracking, Linking, and Analysis of Swedish Encyclopediascited by 0
  30. 2026From Historical Tabular Image to Knowledge Graphs: A Provenance-Aware Modular Pipelinecited by 0
  31. 2026From Traditional Taggers to LLMs: A Comparative Study of POS Tagging for Medieval Romance Languagescited by 0
  32. 2026SharedRequest: Privacy-Preserving Model-Agnostic Inference for Large Language Modelscited by 0
  33. 2026ICDAR 2026 HIPE-OCRepair Competition on LLM-Assisted OCR Post-Correction for Historical Documentscited by 0
  34. 2026Lightweight Person-Place Relation Extraction from Historical Newspapers with Dependency Graphs and Proximity Featurescited by 0
  35. 2026When Names Cross Scripts: A Source-Grounded Benchmark for Historical Entity Reconciliation in the Mongol Worldcited by 0