Computational valency lexica and Homeric formularity

TL;DR

This paper explores the use of distributional semantics to analyze ancient Greek, specifically Homeric formulae, by creating a computational valency lexicon to study semantic variation in a limited corpus.

Contribution

It introduces AGVaLex, a novel automatically extracted valency lexicon for ancient Greek, enabling new computational analysis of Homeric language and formulaic expressions.

Findings

Identifies unique semantic patterns in Homeric formulae

Demonstrates the feasibility of distributional semantics in limited corpora

Provides a new resource for classical language studies

Abstract

Distributional semantics, the quantitative study of meaning variation and change through corpus collocations, is currently one of the most productive research areas in computational linguistics. The wider availability of big data and of reproducible algorithms for analysis has boosted its application to living languages in recent years. But can we use distributional semantics to study a language with such a limited corpus as ancient Greek? And can this approach tell us something about such vexed questions in classical studies as the language and composition of the Homeric poems? Our paper will compare the semantic flexibility of formulae involving transitive verbs in archaic Greek epic to similar verb phrases in a non-formulaic corpus, in order to detect unique patterns of variation in formulae. To address this, we present AGVaLex, a computational valency lexicon for ancient Greek automatically extracted from the Ancient Greek Dependency Treebank. The lexicon contains quantitative corpus-driven morphological, syntactic and lexical information about verbs and their arguments, such as objects, subjects, and prepositional phrases, and has a wide range of applications for the study of the language of ancient Greek authors.