Named Entity Recognition in Historical Italian: The Case of Giacomo Leopardi's Zibaldone

The increased digitization of world's textual heritage poses significant challenges for both computer science and literary studies. Overall, there is an urgent need of computational techniques able to adapt to the challenges of historical texts, such as orthographic and spelling variations, fragmentary structure and digitization errors. The rise of large language models (LLMs) has revolutionized natural language processing, suggesting promising applications for Named Entity Recognition (NER) on historical documents. In spite of this, no thorough evaluation has been proposed for Italian texts. This research tries to fill the gap by proposing a new challenging dataset for entity extraction based on a corpus of 19th century scholarly notes, i.e. Giacomo Leopardi's Zibaldone (1898), containing 2,899 references to people, locations and literary works. This dataset was used to carry out reproducible experiments with both domain-specific BERT-based models and state-of-the-art LLMs such as LLaMa3.1. Results show that instruction-tuned models encounter multiple difficulties handling historical humanistic texts, while fine-tuned NER models offer more robust performance even with challenging entity types such as bibliographic references.