The system of facts extraction from historical texts

Text surfing is described as a separate subclass of such important part of biographic investigation as Internet search. Text surfing is the search of useful information, the character of which cannot be foreseen, and therefore, the appropriate web search query cannot be formulated. The technology of automatic fact extraction is proposed for text surfing. The implementation of such technology is described. Special attention is paid to the problem of anaphora resolution, when the interpretation of an expression depends on another expression in the context. A new hierarchical view of a biographical fact is proposed and analyzed. The experimental verification of applicability of the proposed technology for the memoir and historical literature is described. The article reports the results of these experiments, which confirm applicability and perspectivity of the proposed approach. This technology is meant for a wide range of users, which are not professional historians and biographers. This is important today because public interest in family history is increasing.