# HistNERo: Historical Named Entity Recognition for the Romanian Language

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.00155 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.00155/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Apr 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07258/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation by Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.7495/) (2014)
- [Named Entity Recognition and Classification on Historical Documents: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.11406/) (2021)
- [The birth of Romanian BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.08712/) (2020)
- [Understanding Large-Language Model (LLM)-powered Human-Robot Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03217/) (2024)
- [SMaLL-100: Introducing Shallow Multilingual Machine Translation Model for Low-Resource Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11621/) (2022)
- [Distilling the Knowledge of Romanian BERTs Using Multiple Teachers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12650/) (2021)
- [Introducing RONEC -- the Romanian Named Entity Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01247/) (2019)
- [Comprehensive Overview of Named Entity Recognition: Models, Domain-Specific Applications and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14084/) (2023)
- [Adversarial Capsule Networks for Romanian Satire Detection and Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07845/) (2023)
- [Multilingual Multiword Expression Identification Using Lateral Inhibition and Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.10419/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [RoLargeSum: A Large Dialect-Aware Romanian News Dataset for Summary, Headline, and Keyword Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11317/) (2024)
- [MoRoVoc: A Large Dataset for Geographical Variation Identification of the Spoken Romanian Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.16781/) (2025)
- [UniBERT: Adversarial Training for Language-Universal Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12608/) (2025)
- [RoIt-XMASA: Multi-Domain Multilingual Sentiment Analysis Dataset for Romanian and Italian](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.17134/) (2026)
- [ROMPAR: Morphological Completion and Demographic Unlearning for Romanian-Accented Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.15984/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This work introduces HistNERo, the first Romanian corpus for Named Entity Recognition (NER) in historical newspapers. The dataset contains 323k tokens of text, covering more than half of the 19th century (i.e., 1817) until the late part of the 20th century (i.e., 1990). Eight native Romanian speakers annotated the dataset with five named entities. The samples belong to one of the following four historical regions of Romania, namely Bessarabia, Moldavia, Transylvania, and Wallachia. We employed this proposed dataset to perform several experiments for NER using Romanian pre-trained language models. Our results show that the best model achieved a strict F1-score of 55.69%. Also, by reducing the discrepancies between regions through a novel domain adaption technique, we improved the performance on this corpus to a strict F1-score of 66.80%, representing an absolute gain of more than 10%.