Italian in the Trenches: Linguistic Annotation and Analysis of Texts of the Great War
Authors: Irene De Felice, Felice Dell'Orletta, Giulia Venturi, Alessandro Lenci, Simonetta Montemagni (Università di Pisa, CNR-ILC, 2018)
Topic: Lexical and Semantic Resources and Analysis

Abstract
The paper illustrates the design English. The paper illustrates the design and development of a textual corpus representative of the historical variants of Italian during the Great War, which was enriched with linguistic (lemmatization and pos-tagging) and meta-linguistic annotation. The corpus, after a manual revision of the linguistic annotation, was used for specializing existing NLP tools to process historical texts with promising results.

Introduction
Introduction Introduction World War I (WWI) represents a crucial period in the history of Italian. In fact, De Mauro (1963) claimed that Italian as a national language was born in the trenches of the Great War. Since masses of men from different regions of the peninsula were forced to live together for months in the trenches and behind the lines, and were forced to use Italian as the main communicative medium instead of regional dialects, WWI produced a decisive step forward in the process leading to the linguistic uniﬁcation of Italy. The project Voci della Grande Guerra (VGG)1 provides scholars with a new text corpus to investigate the structure and different varieties of Italian 1http://www.vocidellagrandeguerra.it/ at the time of the Great War. The corpus includes a selection of texts representative of different textual genres and registers, including popular Italian. All texts have been automatically annotated with state-of-the-art NLP tools. A large subset of the corpus has then been manually corrected and enriched with metadata to classify a broad range of phenomena relevant for the study of the linguistic features of early XX century Italian. These characteristics make the VGG corpus unique in the very limited panorama of existing Italian historical corpora, among which it is worth pointing out the corpus dell’Opera del Vocabolario Italiano (OVI), the DiaCORIS corpus (Onelli et al., 2006), the MIDIA corpus (Gaeta et al., 2013), and the Letteratura italiana Zanichelli (LIZ). Moreover, the developed VGG corpus was used in an interesting case-study for the application and adaptation of NLP tools to process historical texts. The aim of this paper is to present the results of the annotation and linguistic analysis of the VGG corpus.

Conclusion
Conclusions and current developments Conclusions and current developments Voices of the Great War is the ﬁrst large corpus of documents in Italian dating back to the period of WWI. This corpus differs from other existing resources because it gives account of the wide range of varieties in which Italian was articulated in the years of WWI, namely from a diastratic (educated vs. uneducated writers), diaphasic (low/informal vs. high/formal registers) and diatopic (regional varieties, dialects) points of view. The linguistic variety subsumed in the corpus posits a number of challenges for current NLP tools, which are trained on texts representative of standard contemporary Italian. In this paper, we showed how we faced such challenges, by developing a more efﬁcient model for the analysis of Italian texts of the period of WWI. For approximately 20,000 tokens of the manually revised part of the corpus, we are building a syntactic annotation level performed according to the Universal Dependency scheme, which will constitute the ﬁrst small treebank for historical Italian. At the end of the project, the texts not covered by copyright will be freely dowloadable together with their annotations. The other texts will instead be browsable online with a dedicated interface.