Building a French Revolution Narrative from Wikidata

Abstract

Abstract

Historical reconstructions can help us better understand important events. This is essential for bettering our knowledge on specific topics and this enables us to build coherent sequences of information. Knowledge graphs like Wikidata contain information about generic knowledge that includes historical events, but the information is often entity-centric rather than event-centric. This makes the analysis and understanding of events related to a same topic harder, since it is less easily accessible. In this demonstration paper, we developed a system to build a timeline about the French Revolution in the form of a graph of a sequence of events, also called a narrative in this work. The system comes with an interface, where a user can first select the types of events to be retrieved, and is then walked through the steps of the system. The output of the system is a timeline of the French Revolution.