When Names Cross Scripts: A Source-Grounded Benchmark for Historical Entity Reconciliation in the Mongol World

📅 2026-08-24
📈 Citations: 0
Influential: 0
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🤖 AI Summary
本文提出MHER基准,用于解决蒙古历史人物身份对齐问题,通过源证据而非仅名字匹配,显著提高准确性。
📝 Abstract
Historical people may appear under different languages, scripts, and transcription traditions, while distinct individuals may share highly similar or even identical names. This makes historical identity reconciliation more than a problem of string matching or transliteration. We introduce MHER, a provenance-controlled benchmark for pairwise reconciliation of person-name attestations from the Mongol world. MHER contains a balanced 396-pair Name-only core over 84 primary historical persons and a stricter 160-pair Source-grounded subset constructed from mention-by-source evidence, with entity-disjoint development and test splits. Across five generative systems, correctly Source-grounded evidence improves paired TEST accuracy by 12.96 to 94.44 percentage points relative to Name-only input. On five identical-surface different-person cases, all models fail under names alone (0/25 model-item decisions), whereas Source-grounded evidence yields 24/25 correct resolutions, with the remaining output an abstention. Context-only ablations show that historical descriptions often carry substantial identity information, while explicitly signaled misgrounding controls produce substantially lower performance. We also find that names are not uniformly beneficial: for Qwen3-8B, restoring surface forms converts ten otherwise correct Context-only distinctions into false identity merges. These results show that historical entity reconciliation depends not only on surface correspondence, but on whether identity judgments respond appropriately to provenance-controlled historical evidence. MHER therefore provides a controlled framework for studying evidence use, abstention, and failure modes in historical NLP.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

Historical Entity Reconciliation
Mongol World
Name Disambiguation
Provenance-Controlled Evidence
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

MHER
Source-grounded
Historical Entity Reconciliation
Provenance-controlled Evidence
Context Information
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Xiang Chen
Independent Researcher
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Zeyu Zhang
University of Amsterdam & Amsterdam UMC