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"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