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

Paper · 2026 · Costanza Marini, Gianluca Casagrande, Alessio Palmero Aprosio et al.

Summary

Historical eyewitness accounts of Mount Vesuvius eruptions hold information that is valuable for hazard assessment and cannot be recovered from fieldwork alone. Geologists have used these sources little, because few are digitized and reading them manually is slow, subjective and hard to replicate. The CorVo project, which joins volcanology and computational linguistics, addresses this gap. Its main resource is the CorVo corpus: 180 printed documents from the 16th to 20th centuries, mostly in Modern Italian. The documents were chosen to cover the volcano's three possible eruptive scenarios, with preference for contemporary or eyewitness descriptions. The texts pass through image pre-processing, OCR and LLM-based correction, which address degraded pages, old typefaces and spelling variation. A domain-aware extraction step then finds ordinary place names and also fine-grained spatial entities that standard NER usually misses. Human annotators validate and georeference these entities in a dedicated interface that supports several geometry types. The result is a time-normalized map view of how eruptions are spatially reflected in texts across centuries. This makes historical sources usable for risk planning and offers NLP a new low-resource test domain.

Key points

  • CorVo corpus: 180 digitized Vesuvius documents, 176 of them taken from the BIBV bibliographic database, which lists over 3,400 records on active Italian volcanoes.
  • Coverage: the corpus balances Plinian, fissural and mixed explosive-effusive eruption scenarios. Only printed texts with adequate scan quality were included.
  • Languages: mostly Modern Italian (after about 1525), plus 11 Latin, 2 Spanish, 6 French, 4 German and 5 English texts.
  • Pipeline: OCR, LLM post-correction, geographic entity extraction, and human-in-the-loop georeferencing with multiple spatial geometries, leading to diachronic geovisualization.
  • Status and release: a manually annotated evaluation set for measuring extraction accuracy is planned as future work. The corpus, metadata and interface code are to be released as open source (corvo-project.eu).

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓University of TrentoTrento · Italy85 works · 15,524 citations🎓University of PaviaPavia · Italy6 works · 69 citations

Also on the byline: Institute of Geosciences and Earth Resources.

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 5The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 16,667 worksArtificial Intelligence · 16,194 worksArts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 worksLiterature and Literary Theory · 519 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.Historical linguistics & language change · 249 works

Cite

Cite as Costanza Marini, Gianluca Casagrande, Alessio Palmero Aprosio and Claudia Principe. 2026. Extracting Volcanological Knowledge from Historical Texts: A Language-Technology Pipeline for Diachronic Geovisualization. Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Language Technologies for Historical and Ancient Languages (LT4HALA 2026) @ LREC 2026.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.63317/3ikuq72uxg2t

@inproceedings{marini2026extracting,
  title = {{Extracting Volcanological Knowledge from Historical Texts: A Language-Technology Pipeline for Diachronic Geovisualization}},
  author = {Costanza Marini, Gianluca Casagrande, Alessio Palmero Aprosio and Claudia Principe},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Language Technologies for Historical and Ancient Languages (LT4HALA 2026) @ LREC 2026},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.63317/3ikuq72uxg2t},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/3ikuq72uxg2t}
}

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