# Event-based Access to Historical Italian War Memoirs

## TL;DR

This paper introduces a method for extracting structured information from Italian historical war memoirs using semantic event modeling, enabling enhanced analysis through graph-based representations for close and distant reading.

## Contribution

It presents a novel approach for semantic extraction from war memoirs, combining event, participant, and role identification with graph-based knowledge representation.

## Key findings

- Quantitative evaluation of key-steps in the extraction process
- Graph-based knowledge representation enables flexible reading modes
- Effective extraction of historical event information from memoirs

## Abstract

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.