WeDH - a Friendly Tool for Building Literary Corpora Enriched with Encyclopedic Metadata

Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), pages 813–816 Marseille, 11–16 May 2020 c⃝ European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC 813 WeDH - a Friendly Tool for Building Literary Corpora Enriched with Encyclopedic Metadata Mattia Egloff, Davide Picca University of Lausanne Switzerland { mattia.egloff, davide.picca}@unil.ch Abstract In recent years the interest in the use of repositories of literary works has been successful. While many efforts related to Linked Open Data go in the right direction, the use of these repositories for the creation of text corpora enriched with metadata remains difficult and cumbersome. In fact, many of these repositories can be useful to the community not only for the automatic creation of textual corpora but also for retrieving crucial meta-information about texts. In particular, the use of metadata provides the reader with a wealth of information that is often not identifiable in the texts themselves. Our project aims to fill both the access to the textual resources available on the web and the possibility of combining these resources with sources of metadata that can enrich the texts with useful information lengthening the life and maintenance of the data itself. We introduce here a user-friendly web interface of the Digital Humanities toolkit named WeDH with which the user can leverage the encyclopedic knowledge provided by DBpedia, wikidata and VIAF in order to enrich the corpora with bibliographical and exegetical knowledge. WeDH is a collaborative project and we invite anyone who has ideas or suggestions regarding this procedure to reach out to us. Keywords: Corpora, Digital Humanities, LinkedOpenData 1. Introduction In recent years the interest in the use of repositories of liter- ary works has been successful. There is a large number of tools and software packages providing access to data repos- itories such as NLTK (Loper and Bird, 2002) or Spacy1. However, many of these resources are not powerful enough to exploit this data to their full extent. While many efforts related to Linked Open Data go in the right direction, the use of these repositories for the creation of text corpora remains difficult and cumbersome. Many of them are not easily accessible since they barely provide the user with API or graphical interfaces. If we take the Gutenberg.org project2 as an example, some attempts have been made to make this resource available in a systematic and structured way. There have been some attempts in or- der to make this resource accessible and linked to other data resources in the LOD Cloud (Auer et al., 2007) but at the moment, unfortunately, Bizer’s work3 does not seem to have been active since 2007 and, to our knowledge, there are no other projects aimed at systematically connecting the Gutenberg resource to the LOD resources for metadata re- trieval. In fact, many of these repositories can be useful to the community not only for the automatic creation of tex- tual corpora but also for retrieving crucial meta-information about texts. In particular, the use of meta-information pro- vides …

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