Rome Wasn't Digitized in a Day - Council on Library and Information ...

48
<strong>in</strong>dividual texts can be much simpler; and (5) “an MVD is the format of an application not a standard.”
Schmidt suggests that MVD documents should be stored <strong>in</strong> a b<strong>in</strong>ary format, particularly if the content
of each text is <strong>in</strong> XML. In their current work, they have created a MultiVersion wiki tool where
scholars can work on cultural heritage texts that exist <strong>in</strong> multiple versions.
Computational L<strong>in</strong>guistics and Natural Language Process<strong>in</strong>g
Computational l<strong>in</strong>guistics 142 has been def<strong>in</strong>ed as “the branch of l<strong>in</strong>guistics <strong>in</strong> which the techniques of
computer science are applied to the analysis and synthesis of language and speech.” 143 NLP has been
def<strong>in</strong>ed as an “area of computer science that develops systems that implement natural language
understand<strong>in</strong>g,” and it is often listed as a subdiscipl<strong>in</strong>e of computational l<strong>in</strong>guistics. 144 The use of
computational l<strong>in</strong>guistics and of NLP has grown enormously <strong>in</strong> the humanities over the past 20 years,
and they have an even longer history <strong>in</strong> classical comput<strong>in</strong>g, as described <strong>in</strong> the <strong>in</strong>troduction to this
review. 145 Bamman and Crane (2009) have argued that both computational l<strong>in</strong>guistics and NLP will be
necessary components of any cyber<strong>in</strong>frastructure for classics:
In decid<strong>in</strong>g how we want to design a cyber<strong>in</strong>frastructure for Classics over the next ten years,
there is an important question that lurks between “where are we now” and “where do we want
to be”: where are our colleagues already Computational l<strong>in</strong>guistics and natural language
process<strong>in</strong>g generally perform best <strong>in</strong> high-resource languages—languages like English, on
which computational research has been focus<strong>in</strong>g for over sixty years, and for which expensive
resources (such as treebanks, ontologies and large, curated corpora) have long been developed.
Many of the tools we would want <strong>in</strong> the future are founded on technologies that already exist
for English and other languages; our task <strong>in</strong> design<strong>in</strong>g a cyber<strong>in</strong>frastructure may simply be to
transfer and customize them for Classical Studies (Bamman and Crane 2009).
This section describes three applications from computational l<strong>in</strong>guistics and NLP <strong>in</strong> terms of services
for digital classics as a whole: treebanks, automatic morphological analysis, and lexicons.
Treebanks
A treebank can be def<strong>in</strong>ed as a “database of sentences which are annotated with syntactic <strong>in</strong>formation,
often <strong>in</strong> the form of a tree.” 146 Treebanks can be either manually or automatically constructed, and
they are used to support a variety of computational tasks such as those <strong>in</strong>volved <strong>in</strong> corpus l<strong>in</strong>guistics,
the study of syntactic features <strong>in</strong> computational l<strong>in</strong>guistics, and tra<strong>in</strong><strong>in</strong>g and test<strong>in</strong>g parsers. There has
been a large growth <strong>in</strong> the number of historical treebanks <strong>in</strong> recent years, <strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g treebanks <strong>in</strong> Greek
and Lat<strong>in</strong>. Currently there are two major treebank projects for Lat<strong>in</strong>, the Perseus Project’s Lat<strong>in</strong>
Dependency Treebank (classical Lat<strong>in</strong>) and the Index Thomisticus (IT) Treebank (medieval Lat<strong>in</strong>), and
142 Relatively little work has been done utiliz<strong>in</strong>g computational l<strong>in</strong>guistics for historical languages such as Lat<strong>in</strong> and Greek, but for some fairly recent
experiments with Lat<strong>in</strong>, see Sayeed and Szpakowicz (2004) and Casadio and Lambek (2005).
143 "computational l<strong>in</strong>guistics plural noun" The Oxford Dictionary of English (revised edition). Ed. Cather<strong>in</strong>e Soanes and Angus Stevenson. Oxford
University Press, 2005. Oxford Reference Onl<strong>in</strong>e. Oxford University Press. Tufts University. 12 April 2010
144 “natural-language process<strong>in</strong>g" A Dictionary of Comput<strong>in</strong>g. Ed John Da<strong>in</strong>tith and Edmund Wright. Oxford University Press, 2008. Oxford Reference
Onl<strong>in</strong>e. Oxford University Press. Tufts University.
145 For some recent exam<strong>in</strong>ations of the potential of computational l<strong>in</strong>guistics and of NLP for the humanities, see Sporleder (2010), de Jong (2009), and
Lüdel<strong>in</strong>g and Zeldes (2007).
146 http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/treebank