# Named Entity Recognition of Historical Texts via Large Language Model

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.18090 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18090/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Aug 2025.

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

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11171/) (2022)
- [Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03172/) (2023)
- [Rethinking the Role of Demonstrations: What Makes In-Context Learning Work?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.12837/) (2022)
- [A Comprehensive Overview of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06435/) (2023)
- [GPT-NER: Named Entity Recognition via Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10428/) (2023)
- [UniversalNER: Targeted Distillation from Large Language Models for Open Named Entity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03279/) (2023)
- [Named Entity Recognition and Classification on Historical Documents: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.11406/) (2021)
- [Self-Improving for Zero-Shot Named Entity Recognition with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08921/) (2023)
- [Yes but.. Can ChatGPT Identify Entities in Historical Documents?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17322/) (2023)
- [hmBERT: Historical Multilingual Language Models for Named Entity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15575/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable versatility across a wide range of natural language processing tasks and domains. One such task is Named Entity Recognition (NER), which involves identifying and classifying proper names in text, such as people, organizations, locations, dates, and other specific entities. NER plays a crucial role in extracting information from unstructured textual data, enabling downstream applications such as information retrieval from unstructured text. Traditionally, NER is addressed using supervised machine learning approaches, which require large amounts of annotated training data. However, historical texts present a unique challenge, as the annotated datasets are often scarce or nonexistent, due to the high cost and expertise required for manual labeling. In addition, the variability and noise inherent in historical language, such as inconsistent spelling and archaic vocabulary, further complicate the development of reliable NER systems for these sources. In this study, we explore the feasibility of applying LLMs to NER in historical documents using zero-shot and few-shot prompting strategies, which require little to no task-specific training data. Our experiments, conducted on the HIPE-2022 (Identifying Historical People, Places and other Entities) dataset, show that LLMs can achieve reasonably strong performance on NER tasks in this setting. While their performance falls short of fully supervised models trained on domain-specific annotations, the results are nevertheless promising. These findings suggest that LLMs offer a viable and efficient alternative for information extraction in low-resource or historically significant corpora, where traditional supervised methods are infeasible.