Speaker: Sara Tonelli
Affiliation: Fondazione Bruno Kessler
Title: Getting a Whiff of the Past through the Analysis of Historical Documents
Abstract: Although olfactory references play a crucial role in our cultural memory, only few works have tried to understand how they are described in historical texts and process them from a computational perspective. As a first step towards olfactory information extraction, I will present ongoing work aimed at defining a theoretical framework to capture this information from a linguistic point of view. This framework has led to the development of a multilingual benchmark with annotated smell events, covering different time periods and domains. Based on this novel dataset, it is now possible to make cross-lingual comparisons, pointing out different attitudes and perceptions of good and bad smells. The annotation effort will also inform the development of NLP-based systems for olfactory information processing. Existing challenges of this task and possible solutions will also be discussed in the talk.
