[Prev][Next][Index][Thread]

"TLG and morphology"

   Once again, I should like to pass on to Members of NT-Greek
a message taken from the Bryn Mawr Clasical Review List
which, I think, may be of interest to some of you.

The forwarded materials follow:
 ==========

BMCR-L 30 June 1992

Greg Crane of Perseus fame asked if we would forward the following note
to BMCR readers.  It's informative as to the state of the art in this kind
of e-grammar work, but the request for feedback is genuine and all replies
to crane%ikaros@harvarda.harvard.edu will be welcome.  JO'D

 ****

 I am writing to seek input on a proposal that we
 tentatively plan to submit to the NEH at the end of the summer.  The
 idea is fairly simple:  we want to use the morphological
 parser that we have been developing for the past eight years
 or so to analyze every unique string in the TLG.

 The simplest use for this work would be to enhance word searches:
 you could ask specifically for fe/rw and retrieve oi)/sw (rather
 than searching for fer-, oi)s- etc.  More generally, a
 morphological database of Greek would open up possibilities
 for the application of more sophisticated retrieval and
 analytic techniques.  Ultimately, the same thing should be done
 to non-literary texts such as inscriptions and papyri,
 but we feel that the massive TLG would be the place to start.

 I would greatly appreciate any reactions that anyone might
 have to the basic idea of the project.  I am particularly
 interested in any reservations that might immediately strike
 people.  Does the project itself seem worth doing?  Are
 there opportunities that we are not pursuing that would allow
 us better to serve the scholarly community and that would not
 detract from our basic goals?

 The working summary of the project follows.  The proposal outline is
 fairly succinct (c. 7 pages) but it is full of Greek and does not lend
 itself readily to transliteration.  If you would like to see a copy,
 please send me your US Mail address and we will send one to you.
 Casual reactions to just this summary are, however, also more than welcome.

 Thanks!

 Gregory Crane
 crane@ikaros.harvard.edu

 Department of Classics
 Boylston 319
 Harvard University
 Cambridge MA 02138


 A Linguistic Database of Classical Greek

 This project will extend an existing parser for classical
 Greek, expanding its database of stems to cover the majority
 of all words attested in the literary record, and will use
 this database to create a morphologically parsed database of
 more than 1,000,000 unique strings available in the TLG:  in
 the end, we will publish the database of analyzed strings,
 the databases of stems and endings which drive the parser and
 the parser itself.

 The resulting databases are an essential
 piece of scholarly infrastructure that will (1) revolutionize
 current searching techniques for the TLG and other Greek
 databases, (2) make it possible to apply more sophisticated
 retrieval/text analysis to Greek texts, and (3) provide a
 basic but crucial lookup tool that will aid non-specialists
 in other fields (e.g., philosophy, political science,
 religion) who seek to work directly with the Greek database.

 ==========

END OF FORWARDED MATERIAL.
richard Hutcheson
sUNY Potsdam