Historical Relation Extraction from Buddhist Temple Documents of the Lanna Kingdom

Abstract

A substantial amount of valuable knowledge has been recorded, namely historical documents, in the form of unstructured data. The Extraction of such information will provide useful historical knowledge. The objective of this study, is to propose a relation extraction technique of unstructured data from Buddhist temple documents in the Lanna Kingdom, consisting of relationships including the name of the kings who built the temple, the name of the king who created or restored a historical site within its grounds and the Buddhist era the temple was built. The research process began with collecting temple data located in the upper northern part of Thailand, with published documentation of temple history in electronic form from Temples Thailand online website. The data was transformed into an electronic document or a text file, then passed to the LEXTO program for word segmentation, while retaining the original meaning. We designed and developed an algorithm to extract relationships between named entities from Buddhist temple documents, and the application of information extraction principles to the process. We then evaluated the 1,093 original documents by using the algorithm to extract the required information. From the research, the results indicated that the proposed technique can be applied effectively, to accurately extract the relations related to Lanna kingdom history from Buddhist temple documents.