Event-based Access to Historical Italian War Memoirs

Abstract

The progressive digitization of historical archives provides new, often domain-specific, textual resources that report on facts and events that have happened in the past; among these, memoirs are a very common type of primary source. In this article, 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.