In this paper we present the Serbian part of the ELTeC multilingual corpus of novels written in the time period 1840-1920. The corpus is being built in order to test various distant reading methods and tools with the aim of re-thinking the European literary history. We present the various steps that led to the production of the Serbian sub-collection: the novel selection and retrieval, text preparation, structural annotation, POS-tagging, lemmatization and named entity recognition. The Serbian sub-collection was published on different platforms in order to make it freely available to various users. Several use examples show that this sub-collection is usefull for both close and distant reading approaches.

In this paper we present the wikification of the ELTeC (European Literary Text Collection), developed within the COST Action “Distant Reading for European Literary History” (CA16204). ELTeC is a multilingual corpus of novels written in the time period 1840—1920, built to apply distant reading methods and tools to explore the European literary history. We present the pipeline that led to the production of the linked dataset, the novels’ metadata retrieval and named entity recognition, transformation, mapping and Wikidata population, followed by named entity linking and export to NIF (NLP Interchange Format). The speeding up of the process of data preparation and import to Wikidata is presented on the use case of seven sub-collections of ELTeC (English, Portuguese, French, Slovenian, German, Hungarian and Serbian). Our goal was to automate the process of preparing and importing information, so OpenRefine and QuickStatements were chosen as the best options. The paper also includes examples of SPARQL queries for retrieval of authors, novel titles, publication places and other metadata with different visualisation options as well as statistical overviews.

In this paper we present first study of Sentiment Analysis (SA) of Serbian novels from the 1840-1920 period. The preparation of sentiment lexicon was based on three existing lexicons: NRC, AFFIN and Bing with additional extensive corrections. The first phase of dataset refinement included filtering the word that are not found in Serbian morphological dictionary and in second automatic POS tagging and lemma were manually corrected. The polarity lexicon was extracted and transformed into ontolex-lemon and published as initial version. The complex inflection system of Serbian language required expansion of sentiment lexicon with inflected forms from Serbian morphological dictionaries. Set of sentences for SA was extracted from 120 novels of Serbian part of ELTeC collection, labelled for polarity and used for several model training. Several approaches for SA are compared, starting with for variation of lexicon based and followed by Logistic Regression, Naive Bayes, Decision Tree, Random Forest, SVN and k-NN. The comparison with models trained on labelled movie reviews dataset indicates that it can not successfully be used for sentiment analysis of sentences in old novels.

In this work, we present a Serbian literary corpus that is being developed under the umbrella of the “Distant Reading for European Literary History” COST Action CA16204. Using this corpus of novels written more than a century ago, we have developed and made publicly available a Named Entity Recognizer (NER) trained to recognize 7 different named entity types, with a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture, having F1 score of ≈91% on the test dataset. This model has been further assessed on a separate evaluation dataset. We wrap up with comparison of the developed model with the existing one, followed by a discussion of pros and cons of the both models.