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Green Information Extraction from Family Books

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Abstract

There is rising demand for the retrieval of genealogical information from semi-structured books. Nuggets of personal interest are currently transcribed piecemeal by volunteers. GreenBook is an effective alternative for recovering most of the desired information from any of the hundreds of thousands of books of ancestral records that have already been scanned and digitized. It minimizes human intervention by letting the user benefit from automatically compiled statistics from the book, and lets computer search benefit from user insights. GreenBook combines enhanced template matching with spreadsheet-based interaction for the rapid specification of the text to be extracted. The accuracy and completeness of the extracted information are limited only by the user’s stamina. About 3 h of user interaction yielded 99% precision and 97% recall on books of Scottish birth and marriage records, Ohio funeral home records, and a family history spanning 300 years. The system is designed to facilitate transition to new books.

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Acknowledgements

My friendship and collaboration with Professor (now Emeritus) David W. Embley of Brigham Young University dates back so many decades that I can no longer tell which ideas were his and which were mine. This work would not have been possible without his and his team’s essential contributions.

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  1. Department of Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 110 8th Street, Troy, NY, 12180, USA

    George Nagy

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Correspondence to George Nagy.

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Nagy, G. Green Information Extraction from Family Books. SN COMPUT. SCI. 1, 23 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42979-019-0024-x

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