Automatic Section Recognition in Obituaries

Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), pages 817–825 Marseille, 11–16 May 2020 c⃝ European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC 817 Automatic Section Recognition in Obituaries Valentino Sabbatino, Laura Bostan, Roman Klinger University of Stuttgart Institut f¨ur Maschinelle Sprachverarbeitung Pfaffenwaldring 5b, 70569 Stuttgart, Germany {valentino.sabbatino,laura.bostan,roman.klinger}@ims.uni-stuttgart.de Abstract Obituaries contain information about people’s values across times and cultures, which makes them a useful resource for exploring cultural history. They are typically structured similarly, with sections corresponding to Personal Information, Biographical Sketch, Characteristics, Family, Gratitude, Tribute, Funeral Information and Other aspects of the person. To make this information available for further studies, we propose a statistical model which recognizes these sections. To achieve that, we collect a corpus of 20058 English obituaries from TheDaily Item, Remembering.CA and The London Free Press. The evaluation of our annotation guidelines with three annotators on 1008 obituaries shows a substantial agreement of Fleiss κ = 0.87. Formulated as an automatic segmentation task, a convolutional neural network outperforms bag-of-words and embedding-based BiLSTMs and BiLSTM-CRFs with a micro F1 = 0.81. Keywords: text segmentation, obituaries, zoning 1. Introduction and Motivation An obituary, typically found in newspapers, informs about the recent death of a person, and usually includes a brief bio- graphy of the deceased person, which sometimes recounts detailed life stories and anecdotes. Structural elements, styles, formats, and information presented vary slightly from culture to culture or from community to community (Moses and Marelli, 2003). Obituaries can be considered to be short essays and contain information on the living family mem- bers and information about the upcoming funeral, such as visitation, burial service, and memorial information as well as the cause of death (Moses and Marelli, 2003). Similarly to biographies, obituaries represent an interesting type of text because the information contained is usually fo- cused on the values and the qualities of a given human being that is part of a particular community (Hume, 2000; Kin- nier et al., 1994; Long, 1987). From the digital humanities perspective investigating obituaries also provides an under- standing of how the community who writes the obituaries decides what is relevant about life and death. Potential applications that are enabled by having access to large collections of obituaries are finding such themes that are relevant while discussing life and death, investigation of different aspects of social memory (Fowler, 2011; ´Arnason et al., 2003) (finding what is being remembered or chosen to be excluded from an obiturary), investigation of correlations between work or other different themes and the cause of death, analysis of linguistic, structural or cultural differences (Bytheway and Johnson, 1996), and the investigation of different biases and values within a community (Simoni, 1983; Hume, 2003; David and Yong, 2002; Chang, 2018). More recently, obituaries have been published on dedicated social networks where the mourners who write the obituar- ies express their emotions and tell stories of the deceased in comments to the obituaries (e. g. Legacy.com, Remem- bering.CA). These networks facilitate interactions between readers and the …

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