Modern interpretations for ancient languages
Digital Libraries have changed the way professional scholars and the general public access and study texts. Firstly, a digitized text allows the user extensive search facilities and interaction and secondly it becomes accessible to a global audience through networking. The CHLT consortium joined their forces and efforts in order to bring together technologies and techniques from the fields of computational linguistics, natural language processing, and information retrieval technologies. In this direction a suite of IT applications was developed for use within digital collections, with special emphasis on early modern Latin, classical Greek, and Old Norse texts. Aiming to help readers understand texts written in difficult and unfamiliar languages, vocabulary profile tools for texts and corpora have been developed that incorporate extensive user feedback mechanisms for evaluation and improvement. The CHLT team provided solutions to problems of document architecture, which opened the way for multi-lingual retrieval facilities for digital library systems, and multi-lingual thesauri automatically extracted from multi-lingual lexica. Furthermore a syntactic parsing toolbox has been developed with facilities for word sense and morphological clarification. This is achieved by the provision of information concerning the distribution of grammatical features within texts, common subjects of verbs and the identification of modifiers in Ancient Greek and Latin. Three CHLT Prototypes (Multilingual Retrieval tool, Vocabulary Word Profile Tool and Syntactic Parser) are currently running on two websites and feedback from their use will aid future development of these morphological tools. Further collaboration on the development of morphological tools in ancient languages is now sought in order to introduce new levels into the study and online teaching of ancient texts.
