Introducing the HIPE 2022 Shared Task: Named Entity Recognition and Linking in Multilingual Historical Documents

We present the HIPE-2022 shared task on named entity processing in multilingual historical documents. Following the success of the first CLEF-HIPE-2020 evaluation lab, this edition confronts systems with the challenges of dealing with more languages, learning domain-specific entities, and adapting to diverse annotation tag sets. HIPE-2022 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 the evaluation lab is to gain new insights into the transferability of named entity processing approaches across languages, time periods, document types, and annotation tag sets.