Extracting Volcanological Knowledge from Historical Texts: A Language-Technology Pipeline for Diachronic Geovisualization

Costanza Marini, Gianluca Casagrande, Alessio Palmero Aprosio, Claudia Principe


Abstract
This paper presents the first results of the CorVo project, a transdisciplinary project combining volcanology and computational linguistics to extract and structure volcanological knowledge from historical documents concerning Mount Vesuvius. We introduce the CorVo corpus, a multilingual diachronic corpus of 180 digitized texts (16th–20th centuries), selected to represent the main eruptive scenarios of the volcano. The digitization workflow integrates image pre-processing, OCR, and LLM-based post-correction to address challenges posed by degraded pages, historical typefaces, and orthographic variation. A domain-aware information extraction pipeline was developed to identify both standard toponyms and fine-grained spatial entities, which are typically overlooked by traditional NER systems. Extracted entities undergo human-in-the-loop validation and georeferencing through a dedicated annotation interface supporting multiple spatial geometries. The resulting dataset enables temporally normalized diachronic geovisualization of the textual-spatial footprint of Vesuvian eruptions across centuries.
Anthology ID:
2026.lt4hala-1.4
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Language Technologies for Historical and Ancient Languages (LT4HALA 2026) @ LREC 2026
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma, Mallorca (Spain)
Editors:
Rachele Sprugnoli, Marco Passarotti
Venues:
LT4HALA | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
38–48
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-ws-lt4hala-04
DOI:
10.63317/3ikuq72uxg2t
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Costanza Marini, Gianluca Casagrande, Alessio Palmero Aprosio, and Claudia Principe. 2026. Extracting Volcanological Knowledge from Historical Texts: A Language-Technology Pipeline for Diachronic Geovisualization. In Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Language Technologies for Historical and Ancient Languages (LT4HALA 2026) @ LREC 2026, pages 38–48, Palma, Mallorca (Spain). ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Extracting Volcanological Knowledge from Historical Texts: A Language-Technology Pipeline for Diachronic Geovisualization (Marini et al., LT4HALA 2026)
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