Overview of HIPE-2022: Named Entity Recognition and Linking in Multilingual Historical Documents

This paper presents an overview of the second edition of HIPE (Identifying Historical People, Places and other Entities), a shared task on named entity recognition and linking in multilingual historical documents. Following the success of the first CLEF-HIPE-2020 evaluation lab, HIPE-2022 confronts systems with the challenges of dealing with more languages, learning domain-specific entities, and adapting to diverse annotation tag sets. This shared task is part of the ongoing efforts of the natural language processing and digital humanities communities to adapt and develop appropriate technologies to efficiently retrieve and explore information from historical texts. On such material, however, named entity processing techniques face the challenges of domain heterogeneity, input noisiness, dynamics of language, and lack of resources. In this context, the main objective of HIPE-2022, run as an evaluation lab of the CLEF 2022 conference, is to gain new insights into the transferability of named entity processing approaches across languages, time periods, document types, and annotation tag sets. Tasks, corpora, and results of participating teams are presented.