Semantic Culturomics (vision paper)

International audienceNewspapers are testimonials of history. The same is increasingly true of social media such as online forums, online communities , and blogs. By looking at the sequence of articles over time, one can discover the birth and the development of trends that marked society and history – a field known as " Culturomics ". But Culturomics has so far been limited to statistics on keywords. In this vision paper, we argue that the advent of large knowledge bases (such as YAGO [37], NELL [5], DBpedia [3], and Freebase) will revolutionize the field. If their knowledge is combined with the news articles, it can breathe life into what is otherwise just a sequence of words for a machine. This will allow discovering trends in history and culture, explaining them through explicit logical rules, and making predictions about the events of the future. We predict that this could open up a new field of research , " Semantic Culturomics " , in which no longer human text helps machines build up knowledge bases, but knowledge bases help humans understand their society