AI Historian: Helping historians organize and verify person-centred temporal clues from dispersed historical narratives
Not on the map. Why?
Abstract (arXiv)
History is not preserved in complete, continuous form. Accounts of a person's activities, relationships and historical contexts are scattered across texts, chapters and narrative perspectives; historians must retrieve, identify and compare these materials to reconstruct temporal sequences and verify them against sources. Here we present AI Historian (AIH), an AI agent system that helps historians organize person-time evidence from dispersed biographical narratives. It takes source sentences as evidence units, identifies people and temporal cues, verifies candidate cross-text associations and infers comparable temporal ranges while preserving traceable source-text evidence. We evaluated AIH on six Shiji cases concerning Liu Bang, Xiang Yu and Xiao He. AIH Agent achieved a temporal-localization MicroIoU of 86.2%, compared with 81.3% for human-only annotation and 17.1% for direct large-language-model prompting; it required about 14 min, versus 1 h 32 min for human-only annotation. We further applied AIH to the Twenty-Four Histories and other ancient Chinese histories, ancient Japanese and Korean histories, and modern and contemporary historical materials, and released the results through Westlake Historian. These results indicate that AIH can reduce the cost of organizing historical materials at scale while turning connections obscured by chapter-based narration into traceable, revisable research questions for collaborative testing.
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 16 of its 47 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 29 Aug 2026.
Builds on
16 of 47 references.
References · 16
- 2023Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contextscited by 3,455
- 2025AlphaEvolve: A coding agent for scientific and algorithmic discoverycited by 867
- 2023ChemCrow: Augmenting large-language models with chemistry toolscited by 631
- 2023Enabling Large Language Models to Generate Text with Citationscited by 595
- 2025Accelerating scientific discovery with Co-Scientistcited by 401
- 2024Can LLMs Generate Novel Research Ideas? A Large-Scale Human Study with 100+ NLP Researcherscited by 363
- 2023SciMON: Scientific Inspiration Machines Optimized for Noveltycited by 179
- 2023Large Language Models for Automated Open-domain Scientific Hypotheses Discoverycited by 100
- 2018A Multi-Axis Annotation Scheme for Event Temporal Relationscited by 75
- 2024MOOSE-Chem: Large Language Models for Rediscovering Unseen Chemistry Scientific Hypothesescited by 72
- 2023TRAM: Benchmarking Temporal Reasoning for Large Language Modelscited by 40
- 2019EventKG - the Hub of Event Knowledge on the Web - and Biographical Timeline Generationcited by 24
4 more
- 2021What is Event Knowledge Graph: A Surveycited by 19
- 2023Can Large Language Model Comprehend Ancient Chinese? A Preliminary Test on ACLUEcited by 10
- 2024AC-EVAL: Evaluating Ancient Chinese Language Understanding in Large Language Modelscited by 5
- 2018Temporal Information Extraction by Predicting Relative Time-linescited by 4
Built on by
Not cited yet.