Challenges and solutions for Latin named entity recognition

Although spanning thousands of years and genres as diverse as liturgy, historiography, lyric and other forms of prose and poetry, the body of Latin texts is still relatively sparse compared to English. Data sparsity in Latin presents a number of challenges for traditional Named Entity Recognition techniques. Solving such challenges and enabling reliable Named Entity Recognition in Latin texts can facilitate many down-stream applications, from machine translation to digital historiography, enabling Classicists, historians, and archaeologists for instance, to track the relationships of historical persons, places, and groups on a large scale. This paper presents the first annotated corpus for evaluating Named Entity Recognition in Latin, as well as a fully supervised model that achieves over 90% F-score on a held-out test set, significantly outperforming a competitive baseline. We also present a novel active learning strategy that predicts how many and which sentences need to be annotated for named entities in order to attain a specified degree of accuracy when recognizing named entities automatically in a given text. This maximizes the productivity of annotators while simultaneously controlling quality

Digital Classical Philology

The buzzwords “Information Society” and “Age of Access” suggest that information is now universally accessible without any form of hindrance. Indeed, the German constitution calls for all citizens to have open access to information. Yet in reality, there are multifarious hurdles to information access – whether physical, economic, intellectual, linguistic, political, or technical. Thus, while new methods and practices for making information accessible arise on a daily basis, we are nevertheless confronted by limitations to information access in various domains. This new book series assembles academics and professionals in various fields in order to illuminate the various dimensions of information's inaccessability. While the series discusses principles and techniques for transcending the hurdles to information access, it also addresses necessary boundaries to accessability.This book describes the state of the art of digital philology with a focus on ancient Greek and Latin. It addresses problems such as accessibility of information about Greek and Latin sources, data entry, collection and analysis of Classical texts and describes the fundamental role of libraries in building digital catalogs and developing machine-readable citation systems

Measuring Greekness: A novel computational methodology to analyze syntactical constructions and quantify the stylistic phenomenon of Attic oratory

This study is the result of a compilation and interpretation of data that derive from Classical studies, but are studied and analyzed using computational linguistics, Treebank annotation, and the development and post-processing of metrics. More specifically, the purpose of this work is to employ computational methods so as to analyze a particular form of Ancient Greek language that is Attic Greek, “measure” its attributes, and explore the socio-political connotations that its usage had in the era of the High Roman Empire. During the first centuries CE, the landscape of the Roman Empire is polyvalent. It consists of native Romans who can be fluent in Latin and Greek, Greeks who are Roman citizens, other easterners who are potentially trilingual and have also assumed Roman citizenship, and even Christians, who identify themselves as Roman citizens but with a different religious identity. It comes as no surprise that language is politicized, and identity, both individual and civic, is constantly reshaped through it. The question I attempt to answer is whether we can quantify Greekness of native and bilingual speakers based on an analytic computational study of Attic dialect. Chapter 1 provides a discussion of the three aforementioned scholarly fields, which were pertinent for the study. I present the precepts of computational linguistics, corpus linguistics, and digital humanities so as to further explicate what prompts this work and how the confluence of three methodologies significantly enhances our apprehension of the issue at hand. In Chapter 2, I approach Greekness, Latinity, and Atticism through the writings of Greek and Roman grammarians and lexicographers and provide the complete list of all the occurrences of the aforementioned notions. Chapters 3 and 4 explicate further the reasoning behind the usage of the Perseids framework and the Prague annotation system. They then proceed to relate the metrics developed, the computational methods, and their subsequent visualization to quantify and objectify the previously purely theoretical inferences. The metric system was developed after careful consideration of the stylistic attributes of Ancient Greek. Therefore, each metric “measures” something pertinent in the formation of the language. The visualizations then afford us a more understandable and interpretable format of the numerical results. For philologists, it is interesting to view the graphic presentation of humanistic ideas, and for the computer scientists the applicability of their methods on a topic that is predominantly philological and social. Finally, chapter 5 recontextualizes the numerical results and their interpretations, as were acquired in chapters 3 and 4, and thus sets the parameters necessary to discuss them in conjunction with readings of literary texts of the period of the High Empire. My intention is to show how numbers are “translated” into a different “language,” the language of the humanist.:Acknowledgments Page 6 Chapter 1: Introduction Page 7 1.1 Focus of the Study Page 7 1.2 Classical Studies and Digital Humanities Page 9 1.3 Corpus Linguistics Page 13 1.4 Humanities Corpus and Corpus Linguistics Page 15 1.5 Synopsis of the Project Page 17 Chapter 2: Linguistic Purity as Ethnic and Educational Marker, or Greek and Roman Grammarians on Greek and Latin. Page 22 2.1 Introduction Page 22 2.2 Grammatical and Lexicographic Definitions Page 23 2.2.1 Greek and Latin languages Page 23 2.2.2 Grammatici Graeci Page 29 2.2.3 Grammatici Latini. Page 32 2.3 Greek and Attic in Greek Lexicographers Page 48 2.4 Conclusion Page 57 Chapter 3: Attic Oratory and its Imperial Revival: Quantifying Theory and Practice Page 58 3.1 Introduction Page 58 3.2 Atticism: Definition and Redefinitions Page 59 3.3 Significance of Enhanced Linguistic and Computational Analysis of Atticism Page 65 3.3.1 The Perseids Project, the Prague Mark-up Language, and Dependency Grammar Page 67 3.4 Evaluating Atticism Page 70 3.4.1 Dionysius’s of Halicarnassus Theoretical Framework Page 73 3.5 Methods: Computational Quantification of Rhetorical Styles Page 82 3.5.1 The Perseids 1.5 ALDT Schema Page 84 3.5.2 Node-based Sentence Metrics Page 93 3.5.3 Computer Implementation Page 104 3.6 Conclusion Page 108 Chapter 4: Experimental results, Analysis, and Topological Haar Wavelets Page 110 4.1 Introduction Page 110 4.2 Experimental Results Page 111 4.3 Data Visualization Page 117 4. 4 Topological Metric Wavelets for Syntactical Quantification Page 153 4.4.1 Wavelets Page 154 4.4.2 Topological Metrics using Wavelets Page 155 4.4.3 Experimental Results Page 157 4.5 Conclusion Page 162 Chapter 5: «Γαλάτης ὢν ἑλληνίζειν»: Greekness, Latinity, and Otherness in the World of the High Empire. Page 163 5.1 Introduction Page 163 5.2 The Multiethnical Constituents of an Imperial Citizen: Anacharsis, Favorinus, and Dionysius’s of Halicarnassus Ethnography. Page 165 5.3 Conclusion Page 185 Chapter 6: Conclusion Page 187 References Page 190 Appendix Page 203 Curriculum Vitae Page 212 Dissertation related Publications Page 225 Selbständigkeitserklärung Page 22

On Making in the Digital Humanities

On Making in the Digital Humanities fills a gap in our understanding of digital humanities projects and craft by exploring the processes of making as much as the products that arise from it. The volume draws focus to the interwoven layers of human and technological textures that constitute digital humanities scholarship. To do this, it assembles a group of well-known, experienced and emerging scholars in the digital humanities to reflect on various forms of making (we privilege here the creative and applied side of the digital humanities). The volume honours the work of John Bradley, as it is totemic of a practice of making that is deeply informed by critical perspectives. A special chapter also honours the profound contributions that this volume’s co-editor, Stéfan Sinclair, made to the creative, applied and intellectual praxis of making and the digital humanities. Stéfan Sinclair passed away on 6 August 2020. The chapters gathered here are individually important, but together provide a very human view on what it is to do the digital humanities, in the past, present and future. This book will accordingly be of interest to researchers, teachers and students of the digital humanities; creative humanities, including maker spaces and culture; information studies; the history of computing and technology; and the history of science and the humanities

A computational approach to Latin verbs: new resources and methods

Questa tesi presenta l'applicazione di metodi computazionali allo studio dei verbi latini. In particolare, mostriamo la creazione di un lessico di sottocategorizzazione estratto automaticamente da corpora annotati; inoltre presentiamo un modello probabilistico per l'acquisizione di preferenze di selezione a partire da corpora annotati e da un'ontologia (Latin WordNet). Infine, descriviamo i risultati di uno studio diacronico e quantitativo sui preverbi spaziali latini

Gender influences in Digital Humanities co-authorship networks

PURPOSE: This paper presents a co-authorship study of authors who published in Digital Humanities journals and examines the apparent influence of gender, or more specifically, the quantitatively detectable influence of gender in the networks they form. DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH: This study applied co-authorship network analysis. Data has been collected from three canonical Digital Humanities journals over 52 years (1966–2017) and analysed. FINDINGS: The results are presented as visualised networks and suggest that female scholars in Digital Humanities play more central roles and act as the main bridges of collaborative networks even though overall female authors are fewer in number than male authors in the network. ORIGINALITY/VALUE: This is the first co-authorship network study in Digital Humanities to examine the role that gender appears to play in these co-authorship networks using statistical analysis and visualisation

Machine learning for ancient languages: a survey

Ancient languages preserve the cultures and histories of the past. However, their study is fraught with difficulties, and experts must tackle a range of challenging text-based tasks, from deciphering lost languages to restoring damaged inscriptions, to determining the authorship of works of literature. Technological aids have long supported the study of ancient texts, but in recent years advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning have enabled analyses on a scale and in a detail that are reshaping the field of humanities, similarly to how microscopes and telescopes have contributed to the realm of science. This article aims to provide a comprehensive survey of published research using machine learning for the study of ancient texts written in any language, script, and medium, spanning over three and a half millennia of civilizations around the ancient world. To analyze the relevant literature, we introduce a taxonomy of tasks inspired by the steps involved in the study of ancient documents: digitization, restoration, attribution, linguistic analysis, textual criticism, translation, and decipherment. This work offers three major contributions: first, mapping the interdisciplinary field carved out by the synergy between the humanities and machine learning; second, highlighting how active collaboration between specialists from both fields is key to producing impactful and compelling scholarship; third, highlighting promising directions for future work in this field. Thus, this work promotes and supports the continued collaborative impetus between the humanities and machine learning

Proceedings of the Fifth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics CLiC-it 2018 : 10-12 December 2018, Torino

On behalf of the Program Committee, a very warm welcome to the Fifth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (CLiC-­‐it 2018). This edition of the conference is held in Torino. The conference is locally organised by the University of Torino and hosted into its prestigious main lecture hall “Cavallerizza Reale”. The CLiC-­‐it conference series is an initiative of the Italian Association for Computational Linguistics (AILC) which, after five years of activity, has clearly established itself as the premier national forum for research and development in the fields of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing, where leading researchers and practitioners from academia and industry meet to share their research results, experiences, and challenges