ENEIDE: A High Quality Silver Standard Dataset for Named Entity Recognition and Linking in Historical Italian

Cristian Santini, Sebastian Barzaghi, Paolo Sernani, Emanuele Frontoni, Laura Melosi, Mehwish Alam


Abstract
This paper introduces ENEIDE (Extracting Named Entities from Italian Digital Editions), a silver standard dataset for Named Entity Recognition and Linking (NERL) in historical Italian texts. The corpus comprises 2,111 documents with over 8,000 entity annotations semi-automatically extracted from two scholarly digital editions: Digital Zibaldone, the philosophical diary of the Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1837), and Aldo Moro Digitale, the complete works of the Italian politician Aldo Moro (1916–1978). Annotations cover multiple entity types (person, location, organization, literary work) linked to Wikidata identifiers, including NIL entities that cannot be mapped to the knowledge graph. To the best of our knowledge, ENEIDE represents the first multi-domain, publicly available NERL dataset for historical Italian with training, development, and test splits. We present a methodology for semi-automatic annotations extraction from manually curated scholarly digital editions, including quality control and annotation enhancement procedures. Baseline experiments using state-of-the-art models demonstrate the dataset’s challenge for NERL and the gap between zero-shot approaches and fine-tuned models. The dataset’s diachronic coverage spanning two centuries makes it particularly suitable for temporal entity disambiguation and cross-domain evaluation. ENEIDE is released under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
Anthology ID:
2026.lrec-1.566
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:
7126–7136
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-main-566
DOI:
10.63317/3hwbiiv85eub
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Cristian Santini, Sebastian Barzaghi, Paolo Sernani, Emanuele Frontoni, Laura Melosi, and Mehwish Alam. 2026. ENEIDE: A High Quality Silver Standard Dataset for Named Entity Recognition and Linking in Historical Italian. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 7126–7136, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. ELRA Language Resource Association.
Cite (Informal):
ENEIDE: A High Quality Silver Standard Dataset for Named Entity Recognition and Linking in Historical Italian (Santini et al., LREC 2026)
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