The Frankfurt Latin Lexicon: From Morphological Expansion and Word Embeddings to SemioGraphs

TL;DR

This paper introduces the Frankfurt Latin Lexicon, a resource for Medieval Latin that combines lemmatization, word embeddings, and SemioGraphs to enhance linguistic analysis and interpretation.

Contribution

It presents a novel integration of morphological expansion, machine learning, and human interpretation through SemioGraphs for Medieval Latin lexicon development.

Findings

Effective lemmatization tested on Capitularies corpus

Enhanced lexical resource through word embeddings and SemioGraphs

Continuous review process improves lexicon accuracy

Abstract

In this article we present the Frankfurt Latin Lexicon (FLL), a lexical resource for Medieval Latin that is used both for the lemmatization of Latin texts and for the post-editing of lemmatizations. We describe recent advances in the development of lemmatizers and test them against the Capitularies corpus (comprising Frankish royal edicts, mid-6th to mid-9th century), a corpus created as a reference for processing Medieval Latin. We also consider the post-correction of lemmatizations using a limited crowdsourcing process aimed at continuous review and updating of the FLL. Starting from the texts resulting from this lemmatization process, we describe the extension of the FLL by means of word embeddings, whose interactive traversing by means of SemioGraphs completes the digital enhanced hermeneutic circle. In this way, the article argues for a more comprehensive understanding of lemmatization, encompassing classical machine learning as well as intellectual post-corrections and, in particular, human computation in the form of interpretation processes based on graph representations of the underlying lexical resources.