Czech Historical Named Entity Corpus v 1.0

As the number of digitized archival documents increases very rapidly, named entity recognition (NER) in historical documents has become very important for information extraction and data mining. For this task an annotated corpus is needed, which has up to now been missing for Czech. In this paper we present a new annotated data collection for historical NER, composed of Czech historical newspapers. This corpus is freely available for research purposes at http://chnec.kiv.zcu.cz/. For this corpus, we have defined relevant domain-specific named entity types and created an annotation manual for corpus labelling. We further conducted some experiments on this corpus using recurrent neural networks in order to in order to show baseline results on this dataset. We experimented with randomly initialized embeddings and static and dynamic fastText word embeddings. We achieved 0.73 F1 score with a bidirectional LSTM model using static fastText embeddings.