# Matching and Linking Entries in Historical Swedish Encyclopedias

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.01170 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01170/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [GLUE: A Multi-Task Benchmark and Analysis Platform for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07461/) (2018)
- [C-Pack: Packed Resources For General Chinese Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07597/) (2023)
- [NV-Embed: Improved Techniques for Training LLMs as Generalist Embedding Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17428/) (2024)
- [Playing with Words at the National Library of Sweden -- Making a Swedish BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01658/) (2020)
- [Connecting a French Dictionary from the Beginning of the 20th Century to Wikidata](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.11022/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [ATLAS: Article Tracking, Linking, and Analysis of Swedish Encyclopedias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.02466/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The textitNordisk familjebok is a Swedish encyclopedia from the 19th and 20th centuries. It was written by a team of experts and aimed to be an intellectual reference, stressing precision and accuracy. This encyclopedia had four main editions remarkable by their size, ranging from 20 to 38 volumes. As a consequence, the textitNordisk familjebok had a considerable influence in universities, schools, the media, and society overall. As new editions were released, the selection of entries and their content evolved, reflecting intellectual changes in Sweden. In this paper, we used digitized versions from textitProject Runeberg. We first resegmented the raw text into entries and matched pairs of entries between the first and second editions using semantic sentence embeddings. We then extracted the geographical entries from both editions using a transformer-based classifier and linked them to Wikidata. This enabled us to identify geographic trends and possible shifts between the first and second editions, written between 1876-1899 and 1904-1926, respectively. Interpreting the results, we observe a small but significant shift in geographic focus away from Europe and towards North America, Africa, Asia, Australia, and northern Scandinavia from the first to the second edition, confirming the influence of the First World War and the rise of new powers. The code and data are available on GitHub at https://github.com/sibbo/nordisk-familjebok.