Prendo la Parola in Questo Consesso Mondiale: A Multi-Genre 20th Century Corpus in the Political Domain
Authors: Sara Tonelli, Rachele Sprugnoli, Giovanni Moretti (Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, 2019)
Topic: Lexical and Semantic Resources and Analysis

Abstract
In this paper we present a multi-genre corpus spanning 50 years of European history. It contains a comprehensive collection of Alcide De Gasperi’s public documents, 2,762 in total, written or transcribed between 1901 and 1954. The corpus comprises different types of texts, including newspaper articles, propaganda documents, official letters and parliamentary speeches. The corpus is freely available and includes several annotation layers, i.e. key-concepts, lemmas, PoS tags, person names and geo-referenced places, representing a high-quality ‘silver’ annotation. We believe that this resource can foster research in historical corpus analysis, stylometry and computational social science, among others.

Introduction
In recent years, political scientists and history scholars have started to exploit the availability of digital material to enrich their research, taking advantage of freely accessible online archives and easy-to-use tools for text processing and data extraction. Active communities have been created around topics such as the study of Parliamentary corpora (see the ParlaCLARIN and ParlaFormat workshops), the analysis of political manifestos and of Presidential speeches. Despite the importance of this research field, copyright and availability in machine-readable format still represent major issues, especially in those countries where no or only limited public initiatives have been undertaken to support the distribution of this kind of documents. For example, while in the US the Federal Digital System grants access to public Presidential documents through APIs and bulk-data repositories, in Italy an effort along this line has started only recently with the support of the Archive of the President of the Republic, but has not delivered substantial results so far. This work represents a first attempt to deal with this lack of data, since we present and make available a large corpus of Italian public documents in the political domain. In particular, we release a comprehensive collection of Alcide De Gasperi’s public documents issued between 1901 and 1954, which had been previously published in four volumes by Il Mulino (De Gasperi, 2006; De Gasperi, 2008a; De Gasperi, 2008b; De Gasperi, 2009) but were not machine-readable. Our repository contains all documents in three formats: txt, XML and tab-separated. Raw text files contain only the body of the documents, and may be straightforwardly used to extract embeddings or topics. XML files include metadata that cover not only the title, the date and the place of publication, but also key-concepts automatically extracted from each text and genre labels manually assigned by domain experts. Furthermore, the release includes silver annotation for lemma, part of speech, person names and place names with associated coordinates in a CoNLL-like format. All files and the corresponding descriptions can be downloaded at https://dh.fbk.eu/technologies/corpus-de-gasperi (with CC BY-NC-SA license). The corpus can also be navigated using the ALCIDE platform (Moretti et al., 2016) at this link: http://alcidedigitale.fbk.eu/.

Conclusion
In this paper we present the release of the corpus of Alcide De Gasperi’s public writings, including 2,762 documents and around 3 million tokens. We make available raw texts, XML files having a small set of metadata and key-concepts and CoNLL-like files with lemma, PoS, PER, GPE annotation together with the coordinates of place names. Based on an evaluation performed on all four annotation layers, we show that their quality is good, although annotation was performed automatically and only partially revised. This is the first freely available corpus of this kind, and we hope that it can be used to foster research in political science, corpus linguistics and history, as well as to develop and test NLP systems using data that are different from widely used contemporary news.