“Voices of the Great War”: A Richly Annotated Corpus of Italian Texts on the First World War

Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), pages 911–918 Marseille, 11–16 May 2020 c⃝ European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC 911 Voices of the Great War: A Richly Annotated Corpus of Italian Texts on the First World War Alessandro Lenci†, Simonetta Montemagni∗, Federico Boschetti∗, Irene De Felice†, Stefano dei Rossi♠, Felice Dell’Orletta∗, Michele Di Giorgio†, Martina Miliani†, Lucia C. Passaro†, Angelica Puddu†, Giulia Venturi∗, Nicola Labanca♣ † University of Pisa, Computational Linguistics Laboratory (CoLing Lab) ∗ Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale “Antonio Zampolli”, CNR, Pisa ♠ WebSoup s.n.c. ♣ University of Siena, Dipartimento di Scienze Storiche e dei Beni Culturali {alessandro.lenci@unipi.it, simonetta.montemagni@ilc.cnr.it, federico.boschetti@ilc.cnr.it, irene def@yahoo.it, stefano@websoup.it, felice.dellorletta@ilc.cnr.it, digiorgio2@gmail.com, martina.miliani@fileli.unipi.it, lucia.passaro@fileli.unipi.it, a.puddu4@studenti.unipi.it, giulia.venturi@ilc.cnr.it, nicola.labanca@unisi.it} Abstract Voci della Grande Guerra (“Voices of the Great War”) is the first large corpus of Italian historical texts dating back to the period of First World War. This corpus differs from other existing resources in several respects. First, from the linguistic point of view it gives account of the wide range of varieties in which Italian was articulated in that period, namely from a diastratic (educated vs. uneducated writers), diaphasic (low/informal vs. high/formal registers) and diatopic (regional varieties, dialects) points of view. From the historical perspective, through a collection of texts belonging to different genres it represents different views on the war and the various styles of narrating war events and experiences. The final corpus is balanced along various dimensions, corresponding to the textual genre, the language variety used, the author type and the typology of conveyed contents. The corpus is annotated with lemmas, part-of-speech, terminology, and named entities. Significant corpus samples representative of the different “voices” have also been enriched with meta-linguistic and syntactic information. The layer of syntactic annotation forms the first nucleus of an Italian historical treebank complying with the Universal Dependencies standard. The paper illustrates the final resource, the methodology and tools used to build it, and the Web Interface for navigating it. Keywords: Historical Corpora, Linguistic and Meta–linguistic Annotation, Information Extraction 1. Introduction and Motivation Historical corpora are still vastly underrepresented within the landscape of language resources, for several reasons. They are hard to collect, because of the time-consuming effort of digitizing printed sources, and they are hard to pro- cess and annotate automatically, because the performances of existing Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools dra- matically drop when applied to diachronic varieties of a language. Moreover, they are not economically attractive, due to their limited use to develop downstream applica- tions with a large-scale economic impact. Still, historical corpora represent an invaluable asset in the era of Digital Humanities, given the growing interest in applying quanti- tative and computational methods to diachronic linguistics and historical text analysis (Tahmasebi et al., 2019). Italian makes not exception to this trend, as diachronic corpora are still few, among which it is worth pointing out the Corpus OVI dell’Italiano antico and the Corpus TLIO (by OVI– CNR), the DiaCORIS corpus (Onelli et al., 2006) and the MIDIA corpus (Gaeta …

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