The progressive digitization of historical archives provides new, often domain specific, textual resources that report on facts and events happened in the past; among them, memoirs are a very common type of primary source. In this paper, we present an approach for extracting information from historical war memoirs and turning it into structured knowledge. This is based on the semantic notions of events, participants and roles. We assess quantitatively each of the key-steps of our approach and provide a graph-based representation of the extracted knowledge, which allows the end user to move between close and distant reading of the collection.
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