Genealogical Indexing of Obituaries Using Automatic Processes

Due to the ability of modern obituaries to provide rich genealogical information for family members who have died within the bounds of “living memory,” family history organizations have recently begun to acquire and index obituaries in vast quantities. The indexing process for these documents is typically done using human labor. Yet we describe an effort by FamilySearch which leverages various kinds of machine learning, statistical analyses, and rule-based processing to automatically index such documents without human intervention at rates thousands of times faster than humans while still achieving high levels of accuracy.