Maritime Indian Ocean Routes: the port of Gwadar/Gw\u101tar

Within the main Indian Ocean routes - both maritime and land ones - Gwadar, divided during the second half of the nineteenth century by the British Boundary Commission between the Persian east bay of Gw\u101tar and the western bay of Gwadar, represented one of the main routes of communication between the Middle East and the Indian Sub-continent, together with a strategic role within slave, ivory, dates, and spice trade from East Africa and from the Arabian Peninsula, directed to Central Asia and vice versa. Both Gw\u101tar and Gwadar, on the coastal Makr\u101n region, have been scientifically defined terra incognita

The Re-globalization Process in the Indian Ocean: the Ibadi Press in Zanzibar (al-Sultaniyya)

During the XIX century, on the Zanzibar Island, a gradual process of osmosis occurred through the first publications that often-linked magical practices with the precepts of the Quran, resulting in a social and political interpretation of the Omani power on the Eastern African island that reflected a multiplicity of cultural roots. The vast network of international trade links, and the presence of numerous mercantile communities were progressively consolidated, stretching from Africa, Arabia, the Gulf, and India as far as Southeast Asia, Indonesia and even China with Zanzibar as a polarizing new capital and centre. Modernity brought by the international presences in Zanzibar involved numerous reflections in order not to 'forgetting' the traditional society values and the main Ibadi precepts inside the new-coming progresses. Ibadi press on Zanzibar Island was in fact representing one of these social and political objects: re-globalizing the ancient communication flows between Oman and East Africa

Arretium or Arezzo? A Neural Approach to the Identification of Place Names in Historical Texts

This paper presents the application of a neural architecture to the identification of place names in English historical texts. We test the impact of different word embeddings and we compare the results to the ones obtained with the Stanford NER module of CoreNLP before and after the retraining using a novel corpus of manually annotated historical travel writings

Muscat and Gwadar: connections between seaboard communities during the XIX century

Abstract During the nineteenth century Baluch tribes protected, hid, supported and faithfully defended the Al Bu Sa’id dynasty of Oman, thanks also to the tribal structure and clan-family relationships of their society which, traditionally nomadic, could count on both Makran and peninsular, and continental solidarity. The town of Gwadar was at the same time: a dominion of the Sultans of Oman, a place of interest for the Gichki from Ketch, a strategic observatory for the British government along the coast of Makran in the Persian direction and a station of the Indo-European telegraph line. Large quantities of rifles were imported from Europe and from Russia through Afghanistan destined to enforce the leaderships of Central Asia, the Gulf, the Arabian Peninsula, and East Africa; while secretly arms were imported from European private companies. The trading ports of Bander Abbas, Bushire, and Muscat were the most important markets for arms. Between 1890 and the first decades of the twentieth century, Muscat became the centre of arms trade for the Gulf and the Indian Ocean area. And the presence of Asian merchant communities did play a significant role both on the Gulf shores and in East Africa

Power, slavery, and spirit possession in East Africa: a few reflections

Spirit possession and its relationship with power aims to offer here a few opportunities towards a better understanding not only of East African societies, but most of all, of their historical role in numerous political and military conflicts and also within peace-building processes, that represent a continuation of a topic of long-standing concern in East African history. The relationships between religions, local cultures and institutional powers throughout contemporary East African history offer here a few reflection spaces

MultiEmotions-it: A new dataset for opinion polarity and emotion analysis for Italian

This paper1 presents a new linguistic resource for Italian, called MultiEmotions-It, containing comments to music videos and advertisements posted on YouTube and Facebook. These comments are manually annotated according to four different dimensions: i.e., relatedness, opinion polarity, emotions and sarcasm. For the annotation of emotions we adopted the Plutchik\u2019s model taking into account both basic and complex emotions, i.e. dyads

Novel Event Detection and Classification for Historical Texts

Event processing is an active area of research in the Natural Language Processing community but resources and automatic systems developed so far have mainly addressed contemporary texts. However, the recognition and elaboration of events is a crucial step when dealing with historical texts particularly in the current era of massive digitization of historical sources: research in this domain can lead to the development of methodologies and tools that can assist historians in enhancing their work, while having an impact also on the field of Natural Language Processing. Our work aims at shedding light on the complex concept of events when dealing with historical texts. More specifically, we introduce new annotation guidelines for event mentions and types, categorised into 22 classes. Then, we annotate a historical corpus accordingly, and compare two approaches for automatic event detection and classification following this novel scheme. We believe that this work can foster research in a field of inquiry so far underestimated in the area of Temporal Information Processing. To this end, we release new annotation guidelines, a corpus and new models for automatic annotation

One, no one and one hundred thousand events: Defining and processing events in an inter-disciplinary perspective

We present an overview of event definition and processing spanning 25 years of research in NLP. We first provide linguistic background to the notion of event, and then present past attempts to formalize this concept in annotation standards to foster the development of benchmarks for event extraction systems. This ranges from MUC-3 in 1991 to the Time and Space Track challenge at SemEval 2015. Besides, we shed light on other disciplines in which the notion of event plays a crucial role, with a focus on the historical domain. Our goal is to provide a comprehensive study on event definitions and investigate which potential past efforts in the NLP community may have in a different research domain. We present the results of a questionnaire, where the notion of event for historians is put in relation to the NLP perspective

EVALITA 2009: Description and Results of the Local Entity Detection and Recognition (LEDR) task.

In this paper, we describe motivations and features of the LEDR (Local Entity Detection and Recognition) task at EVALITA 2009. Our work refers to the task of the same name within the Automatic Content Extraction (ACE) program. We adopted the ACE annotation scheme adapting it to the specific morpho-syntactic features of Italian in order to create training and test data to be used in the evaluation of Information Extraction systems for Italian. In this report annotated data and evaluation measures are presented. Moreover, the results obtained by the participating system are showed

Effects of reading proficiency and of base and whole-word frequency on reading noun- and verb-derived words: an eye-tracking study in Italian primary school children

The aim of this study is to assess the role of readers' proficiency and of the base-word distributional properties on eye-movement behavior. Sixty-two typically developing children, attending 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade, were asked to read derived words in a sentence context. Target words were nouns derived from noun bases (e.g., umorista, 'humorist'), which in Italian are shared by few derived words, and nouns derived from verb bases (e.g., punizione, 'punishment'), which are shared by about 50 different inflected forms and several derived words. Data shows that base and word frequency affected first-fixation duration for nouns derived from noun bases, but in an opposite way: base frequency had a facilitative effect on first fixation, whereas word frequency exerted an inhibitory effect. These results were interpreted as a competition between early accessed base words (e.g., camino, chimney) and target words (e.g., caminetto, fireplace). For nouns derived from verb bases, an inhibitory base frequency effect but no word frequency effect was observed. These results suggest that syntactic context, calling for a noun in the target position, lead to an inhibitory effect when a verb base was detected, and made it difficult for readers to access the corresponding base+suffix combination (whole word) in the very early processing phases. Gaze duration was mainly affected by word frequency and length: for nouns derived from noun bases, this interaction was modulated by proficiency, as length effect was stronger for less proficient readers, while they were processing low-frequency words. For nouns derived from verb bases, though, all children, irrespective of their reading ability, showed sensitivity to the interaction within frequency of base+suffix combination (word frequency) and target length. Results of this study are consistent with those of other Italian studies that contrasted noun and verb processing, and confirm that distributional properties of morphemic constituents have a significant impact on the strategies used for processing morphologically complex words