The Foggia Occupator Corpus: Digitisation, Annotation, and Computational Analysis of an Occupation-Era Newspaper (1945-1946)

Michele Ciletti


Abstract
Historical newspapers are crucial sources yet often remain undigitised or lack machine-readable text. We present the Foggia Occupator corpus, a linguistically enriched, openly licensed resource built from twenty-two issues (Dec 1945–Aug 1946) of a weekly newspaper produced by U.S. personnel in occupied Foggia, Italy. High-resolution scans were processed via OCR with LLM-assisted correction (GPT-4o) and full human verification, then segmented into 874 articles ( 216k tokens). We annotate topics, named entities and typed relations via a semi-automatic pipeline with manual reconciliation, and perform argument mining on civics- and conflict-related content, yielding 1,735 arguments. The entity–relation layer supports network analyses that reveal sparse, modular structures linking military units, civic bodies, and social life. We release TEI-XML with entity spans, JSON article files with metadata, CSVs of entities/relations with temporal counts, and an arguments JSON, all under a Creative Commons 4.0 licence. Beyond documenting an in-between moment of reconstruction, the resource enables benchmarking for OCR-robust NER/RE and studies of framing, stance, and community structure in post-war local media.
Anthology ID:
2026.lrec-1.536
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Stelios Piperidis, Núria Bel, Henk van den Heuvel, Nancy Ide, Simon Krek, Antonio Toral
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resource Association
Note:
Pages:
6731–6739
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-main-536
DOI:
10.63317/2xbscmzsjers
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Michele Ciletti. 2026. The Foggia Occupator Corpus: Digitisation, Annotation, and Computational Analysis of an Occupation-Era Newspaper (1945-1946). In Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 6731–6739, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. ELRA Language Resource Association.
Cite (Informal):
The Foggia Occupator Corpus: Digitisation, Annotation, and Computational Analysis of an Occupation-Era Newspaper (1945-1946) (Ciletti, LREC 2026)
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