AI Historian: Helping historians organize and verify person-centred temporal clues from dispersed historical narratives
Yifeng LuZijie YangJie LiQingkai MinYue Zhang
Sep 2026
Natural Language Processing
Abstract
History is not preserved in complete, continuous form. Accounts of a person's activities, relationships and historical contexts are scattered across texts, chapters and narrative perspectives; historians must retrieve, identify and compare these materials to reconstruct temporal sequences and verify them against sources. Here we present AI Historian (AIH), an AI agent system that helps historians organize person-time evidence from dispersed biographical narratives. It takes source sentences as evidence units, identifies people and temporal cues, verifies candidate cross-text associations and infers comparable temporal ranges while preserving traceable source-text evidence. We evaluated AIH on six Shiji cases concerning Liu Bang, Xiang Yu and Xiao He. AIH Agent achieved a temporal-localization MicroIoU of 86.2%, compared with 81.3% for human-only annotation and 17.1% for direct large-language-model prompting; it required about 14 min, versus 1 h 32 min for human-only annotation. We further applied AIH to the Twenty-Four Histories and other ancient Chinese histories, ancient Japanese and Korean histories, and modern and contemporary historical materials, and released the results through Westlake Historian. These results indicate that AIH can reduce the cost of organizing historical materials at scale while turning connections obscured by chapter-based narration into traceable, revisable research questions for collaborative testing.
Agile - denoting "the quality of being agile, readiness for motion, nimbleness, activity, dexterity in motion" - software development methods are attempting to offer an answer to the eager business community asking for lighter weight along with faster and nimbler software development processes. This is especially the case with the rapidly growing and volatile Internet software industry as well as for the emerging mobile application environment. The new agile methods have evoked substantial amount of literature and debates. However, academic research on the subject is still scarce, as most of existing publications are written by practitioners or consultants. The aim of this publication is to begin filling this gap by systematically reviewing the existing literature on agile software development methodologies. This publication has three purposes. First, it proposes a definition and a classification of agile software development approaches. Second, it analyses ten software development methods that can be characterized as being "agile" against the defined criterion. Third, it compares these methods and highlights their similarities and differences. Based on this analysis, future research needs are identified and discussed.
P. Abrahamsson, O. Salo, Jussi Ronkainen et al.· arXiv.org· 728 citations· ⚡54
The growing literature on affect among software developers mostly reports on the linkage between happiness, software quality, and developer productivity. Understanding happiness and unhappiness in all its components -- positive and negative emotions and moods -- is an attractive and important endeavor. Scholars in industrial and organizational psychology have suggested that understanding happiness and unhappiness could lead to cost-effective ways of enhancing working conditions, job performance, and to limiting the occurrence of psychological disorders. Our comprehension of the consequences of (un)happiness among developers is still too shallow, being mainly expressed in terms of development productivity and software quality. In this paper, we study what happens when developers are happy and unhappy while developing software. Qualitative data analysis of responses given by 317 questionnaire participants identified 42 consequences of unhappiness and 32 of happiness. We found consequences of happiness and unhappiness that are beneficial and detrimental for developers' mental well-being, the software development process, and the produced artifacts. Our classification scheme, available as open data enables new happiness research opportunities of cause-effect type, and it can act as a guideline for practitioners for identifying damaging effects of unhappiness and for fostering happiness on the job.
D. Graziotin, Fabian Fagerholm, Xiaofeng Wang et al.· Journal of Systems and Softw...· 236 citations· ⚡13
Mobile phones have been closed environments until recent years. The change brought by open platform technologies such as the Symbian operating system and Java technologies has opened up a significant business opportunity for anyone to develop application software such as games for mobile terminals. However, developing mobile applications is currently a challenging task due to the specific demands and technical constraints of mobile development. Furthermore, at the moment very little is known about the suitability of the different development processes for mobile application development. Due to these issues, we have developed an agile development approach called Mobile-D. The Mobile-D approach is briefly outlined here and the experiences gained from four case studies are discussed.
P. Abrahamsson, Antti Hanhineva, H. Hulkko et al.· Conference on Object-Oriente...· 225 citations· ⚡18
For more than thirty years, it has been claimed that a way to improve software developers’ productivity and software quality is to focus on people and to provide incentives to make developers satisfied and happy. This claim has rarely been verified in software engineering research, which faces an additional challenge in comparison to more traditional engineering fields: software development is an intellectual activity and is dominated by often-neglected human factors (called human aspects in software engineering research). Among the many skills required for software development, developers must possess high analytical problem-solving skills and creativity for the software construction process. According to psychology research, affective states—emotions and moods—deeply influence the cognitive processing abilities and performance of workers, including creativity and analytical problem solving. Nonetheless, little research has investigated the correlation between the affective states, creativity, and analytical problem-solving performance of programmers. This article echoes the call to employ psychological measurements in software engineering research. We report a study with 42 participants to investigate the relationship between the affective states, creativity, and analytical problem-solving skills of software developers. The results offer support for the claim that happy developers are indeed better problem solvers in terms of their analytical abilities. The following contributions are made by this study: (1) providing a better understanding of the impact of affective states on the creativity and analytical problem-solving capacities of developers, (2) introducing and validating psychological measurements, theories, and concepts of affective states, creativity, and analytical-problem-solving skills in empirical software engineering, and (3) raising the need for studying the human factors of software engineering by employing a multidisciplinary viewpoint.
D. Graziotin, Xiaofeng Wang, P. Abrahamsson· PeerJ· 216 citations· ⚡13
GAOKAO-Bench is introduced, an intuitive benchmark that employs questions from the Chinese GAOKAO examination as test samples, including both subjective and objective questions that contribute a robust evaluation benchmark for future large language models and offers valuable insights into the advantages and limitations of such models.
Xiaotian Zhang, Chun-yan Li, Yi Zong et al.· arXiv.org· 216 citations· ⚡17
Software startups are newly created companies with little operating history and oriented towards producing cutting-edge products. As their time and resources are extremely scarce, and one failed project can put them out of business, startups need effective practices to face with those unique challenges. However, only few scientific studies attempt to address characteristics of failure, especially during the early-stage. With this study we aim to raise our understanding of the failure of early-stage software startup companies. This state-of-practice investigation was performed using a literature review followed by a multiple-case study approach. The results present how inconsistency between managerial strategies and execution can lead to failure by means of a behavioral framework. Despite strategies reveal the first need to understand the problem/solution fit, actual executions prioritize the development of the product to launch on the market as quickly as possible to verify product/market fit, neglecting the necessary learning process.
Carmine Giardino, Xiaofeng Wang, P. Abrahamsson· International Conference on...· 175 citations· ⚡19
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