Natural Language Processing meets Holocaust Research

Martin Wynne has co-organized a number of events as part of an ongoing collaboration between experts in linguists  and Holocaust studies scholars and archivists. Following a successful kick-off workshop at King’s College, London in May 2023 entitled Using Holocaust Testimonies as Research Data, further events in 2024 include a follow-up workshop Natural Language Processing Meets Holocaust Archives, at Charles University, Prague, in March, a pre-conference workshop Holocaust Testimonies as Language Resources at the LREC-COLING conference in Turin, a paper at the EHRI Academic Conference event Researching the Holocaust in the Digital Age in Warsaw, and a panel at the Lessons and Legacies conference in Los Angeles.  The collaboration is backed by the CLARIN and EHRI European research infrastructures, and the goal of all of these activities is to explore the application of linguistic analysis tools to make Holocaust testimonies (and other forms of historical documentation) more easily accessible and usable for research, as well exploring the possibilities of asking new research questions across large corpora of texts in accessible formats and with enhanced with linguistic annotation.