A standard model for extracting biographic facts is to learn templatic contextual patterns such as <NAME> "was born in" <Birthplace>.
such templatic patterns can be learned using seed examples of the attribute in question and, there has been a plethora of work in the seed-based bootstrapping literature which addresses this problem (Ravichandran and Hovy, 2002;Thelen and Riloff, 2002;Mann and Yarowsky, 2005; for our baseline we implemented a standard Ravichandran and Hovy (2002) pattern learning model using 100 seed 2 examples from an online biographic database called NNDB (http://www.nndb.com) for each of the biographic attributes: "Birthdate", "Birthplace", "Deathdate", "Gender", "Nationality", "Occupation" and "Religion".