Using text corpora for volcanic eruption impact assessment and resilience planning: The first steps of the CorVo project

The CorVo project[1] (Corpora for Volcanoes) aims at building an innovative tool for volcanic risk forecasting, impact assessment, and resilience planning. Exploiting technologies coming from the digital humanities and computational linguistics, a flexible digital interface will be developed to query a body of documents (the CorVo corpus) containing extensive descriptions of the past activity of one of Italy’s most high-risk volcanoes: the Vesuvius. The methodology proposed is an innovative type of approach and the resulting prototype is likely to be extended to other volcanoes in multi-hazard settings.

By querying the linguistically annotated corpus, end users (such as Civil Protection units and other stakeholders) will be able to quickly obtain important information from past eruptive scenarios, such as precursors, phenomenology, deposit distribution, and damages, as well as their social impact and the reactions they provoked in the institutions. In this way, they will be able to tackle future emergency scenarios, assess area vulnerability, and plan their response strategies in the best way.

In order for the CorVo tool to return useful information, the CorVo corpus linked to it needs to contain a balanced selection of documents that describe the different types of eruptions the volcano may experience: Plinian-type, fissural or mixed (explosive-effusive). Therefore, the first three eruptions that are going to be included in the pilot are going to be the Plinian-type eruption of 1631, the fissural eruption of 1794, and the most recent mixed eruption of 1944. In order to test the validity of the obtained tool, the selected eruptions are in the number of the best-studied Vesuvius eruptions, also from the point of view of the information retrieved from historical sources. The bulk of the documents to be included in the corpus is going to be selected from the BIBV Database (http://libero.area.pi.cnr.it/libbiv/aboutBIV.html). The testing phase of the tool will be carried out in cooperation with other units of the PNRR EPOS MEET project.

^[1] The CorVo project is funded as Operating Unit CNR-IGG, WP11 Action 11c of the MUR PNRR EPOS MEET project, which started November, 1^st 2022.