Event-based Access to Historical Italian War Memoirs
This work addresses the need for domain-specific information extraction from historical archives, particularly for researchers in digital humanities, but it is incremental as it applies existing semantic methods to a new dataset.
The paper tackles the problem of extracting structured knowledge from Italian historical war memoirs by using semantic notions of events, participants, and roles, resulting in a graph-based representation that enables both Close and Distant Reading of the collection, with quantitative evaluation of key steps.
The progressive digitization of historical archives provides new, often domain specific, textual resources that report on facts and events which have happened in the past; among these, memoirs are a very common type of primary source. In this paper, we present an approach for extracting information from Italian historical war memoirs and turning it into structured knowledge. This is based on the semantic notions of events, participants and roles. We evaluate quantitatively each of the key-steps of our approach and provide a graph-based representation of the extracted knowledge, which allows to move between a Close and a Distant Reading of the collection.