Annotation of Temporal Information on Historical Texts: A Small Corpus for a Big Challenge

This paper presents the De Gasperi corpus, a freely available linguistic resource for Italian annotated with temporal information at different levels: i.e., events, temporal expressions, temporal signals and temporal relations. The De Gasperi corpus has been employed to understand how well systems built for contemporary Italian perform on historical texts and also as the starting point for the analysis of the main open issues related to the application to the history domain of an existing annotation schema, namely TimeML and its adaptation to Italian.