History-Driven Entity Categorization

Knowledge of entity histories is often necessary for comprehensive understanding and characterization of entities. In this paper we introduce a novel task of history-based entity categorization. Taking a set of entity-related documents as an input we detect latent entity categories whose members share similar histories, effectively, grouping entities based on the similarities of their historical developments. Next, we generate comparative timelines for each generated group allowing users to spot similarities and differences in entity histories. We evaluate our approach on several datasets of different entity types demonstrating its effectiveness against competitive baselines.