Timestamping Entities Using Contextual Information

Wikipedia is the result of collaborative effort aiming to represent human knowledge and to make it accessible to the public. Many Wikipedia articles however lack key metadata information. For example, relatively large number of people described in Wikipedia have no information on their birth and death dates. We propose in this paper to estimate entity's lifetimes using link structure in Wikipedia focusing on person entities. Our approach is based on propagating temporal information over links between Wikipedia articles.