Cross-lingual Biography Enrichment via Claim Extraction and Alignment
2026-08-24 • Computation and Language
Computation and LanguageArtificial Intelligence
AI summaryⓘ
The authors looked at how English Wikipedia pages about people, especially women from places where English is not the main language, can be improved by using information from Wikipedia pages in other languages like French, Chinese, or Azerbaijani. They created a test set called CLAW-4L, which has pairs of biographies in English and another language, including notes on specific facts and how they relate. Their method finds and matches important facts between the two languages and then updates the English biography with new, verified information. They found that using other-language biographies helps make English pages better, but it is still hard when working with languages that have fewer resources.
Wikipedia biographycross-lingual enrichmentCLAIM alignmentlong-tail figureslow-resource languagesfact extractionnatural language processingmultilingual datadataset benchmarkbiography rewriting
Authors
Yifei Song, Ziyang Chen, Emil Sayilov, Claire Gardent
Abstract
English Wikipedia is often treated as the default encyclopedic source, yet non-English Wikipedia editions can contain richer locally grounded information for long-tail figures. We study cross-lingual biography enrichment: enriching an existing English biography with facts supported by a non-English biography about the same person. Focusing on women from non-English-speaking contexts, we introduce \textsc{CLAW-4L}, a benchmark consisting of 300 Wikipedia biography pairs linking an English biography with its French, Chinese or Azerbaijani counterpart, along with claim annotations and a fine-grained claim-pair relation corpus. We propose a claim-based enrichment framework that extracts English claims from both biographies, aligns them to identify enrichment evidence from the non-English biography, and rewrites the English biography using the selected claims. Our results show that non-English Wikipedia biographies provide valuable evidence for improving English biography coverage, while lower-resource settings remain challenging.