Creating a Typology of Places to Annotate Holocaust Testimonies Through Machine Learning

Christine Liu, William J.B. Mattingly


Abstract
The Holocaust was not only experienced in iconic places like Auschwitz or the Warsaw ghetto. Ordinary places, such as city streets, forests, hills, and homes, were transformed by occupation and systematic violence. While most of these places are unnamed and locationally ambiguous, their omnipresence throughout post-war testimonies from witnesses and survivors of the Holocaust emphasize their undeniable importance. This paper shares a methodology for developing a typology of places in order to annotate both named and unnamed places within interview transcripts from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) through a machine learning model. The approach underscores the benefits of hybrid analysis through both automated extraction and manual review to create distinct categories of places. This paper also reviews how testimony transcripts were converted into structured data for annotation and previews ongoing work to design a search engine for users to dynamically query this place-based approach to studying the Holocaust.
Anthology ID:
2024.htres-1.5
Volume:
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Holocaust Testimonies as Language Resources (HTRes) @ LREC-COLING 2024
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Isuri Anuradha, Martin Wynne, Francesca Frontini, Alistair Plum
Venues:
htres | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
37
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.htres-1.5
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Christine Liu and William J.B. Mattingly. 2024. Creating a Typology of Places to Annotate Holocaust Testimonies Through Machine Learning. In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Holocaust Testimonies as Language Resources (HTRes) @ LREC-COLING 2024, page 37, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Creating a Typology of Places to Annotate Holocaust Testimonies Through Machine Learning (Liu & Mattingly, htres-WS 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.htres-1.5.pdf