SunoikisisDC Summer 2022 Session 11
Thursday July 7, 2022, starting at 17:15 CEST (for 90 minutes)
Convenors: Monica Berti (Universität Leipzig), Chiara Palladino (Furman University), David Wright (Furman University), and Tariq Yousef (Universität Leipzig)
Youtube link: https://youtu.be/F4upzNsyTYA
The goal of this session is to introduce and show recent developments in translation alignment techniques for ancient Greek and Latin.
The session presents the results of automatic translation alignment experiments on text corpus in Ancient Greek translated into Latin. We use a state-of-the-art alignment workflow based on a contextualized multilingual language model that is fine-tuned on the alignment task for Ancient Greek and Latin. The corpus is represented by the Digital Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum (DFHG), which is the digital open version of the five volumes of the first big printed collection of ancient Greek fragmentary historians edited by Karl Muller in the 19th century. The collection gathers more than eight thousand quotations and text-reuses (fragments) of lost works written by more than six hundred authors ranging from the 6th century BC through the 7th century.
The model is fine-tuned on monolingual Ancient Greek texts, bilingual parallel datasets, and manually aligned sentences. The performance of the alignment model is evaluated on an alignment gold standard dataset consisting of 100 parallel fragments aligned manually by two domain experts, with a 90.5% Inter-Annotator-Agreement (IAA). An interactive online interface is provided to enable users to explore the aligned fragments collection and examine the alignment model’s output.
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T. Yousef, C. Palladino, D.J. Wright, M. Berti. "Automatic Translation Alignment for Ancient Greek and Latin". Proceedings of the LREC 2022 Second Workshop on Language Technologies for Historical and Ancient Languages LT4HALA 2022. Eds. R. Sprugnoli and M. Passarotti. European Language Resources Association (ELRA) 2022, 101-107. URL: http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2022/workshops/LT4HALA/pdf/2022.lt4hala2022-1.14.pdf
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T. Yousef, C. Palladino, F. Shamsian, A. d’Orange Ferreira, M. Ferreira dos Reis. "An automatic model and Gold Standard for translation alignment of Ancient Greek". Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2022), Marseille, 20-25 June 2022, 5894–5905. URL: http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2022/pdf/2022.lrec-1.634.pdf
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M. Berti. Digital Editions of Historical Fragmentary Texts. Digital Classics Books 5. Propylaeum, Heidelberg 2021. DOI: https://doi.org/10.11588/propylaeum.898
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M. Berti. "Historical fragmentary texts in the digital age". In Digital Classical Philology. Ancient Greek and Latin in the Digital Revolution. Ed. M. Berti. De Gruyter, Berlin 2019, 257–276. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110599572-015
- F. Shamsian, Learning Ancient Greek in Persian through digital annotations. Digital Classicist London Seminars. Friday July 1, 2022 - 17:00 UK Time. Institute of Classical Studies London. Link: https://youtu.be/ACRkAD9AzYw
- Raquel de Pedro (1999). The Translatability of Texts: A Historical Overview. Meta, XLIV, 4, 1999. Available: http://www3.uji.es/~aferna/EA0921/4a-Translatability.pdf
- C. Palladino, M. Foradi, T. Yousef. "Translation alignment for Historical Language Learning. A case study." DHQ 15.3 (2021). Available: http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/15/3/000563/000563.html
- C. Palladino. "Reading texts in digital environments: applications of translation alignment for Classical language learning." Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, 18 (2020). Available: https://jitp.commons.gc.cuny.edu/reading-texts-in-digital-environments-applications-of-translation-alignment-for-classical-language-learning/
- T. Yousef, C. Palladino, F. Shamsian, M. Foradi. "Translation Alignment with Ugarit." Information 13(2):65. Available: https://www.mdpi.com/2078-2489/13/2/65
- Dimitar Iliev, “Laptops in the Auditorium: Facing Educational Challenges in Classics by Teaching Digital Tools,” Digital Presentation and Preservation of Cultural and Scientific Heritage, no. X (2020): 65–78. Available: https://dipp.math.bas.bg/images/2020/065-078_1.4_iDiPP2020-11_v.1c.pdf.
- Philipp Koehn (2009). Statistical Machine Translation, Chapter 4: “Word-Based Models.” Cambridge University Press
- Despoina Panou (2013). “Equivalence in Translation Theories: A Critical Evaluation, Theory and Practice.” Language Studies 3.1, pp. 1-6. Available: http://www.academypublication.com/issues/past/tpls/vol03/01/01.pdf
- Maia Shukhoskvili, “Methodology of Translation Alignment of Georgian Text of Plato’s ‘Theaetetus,’” International Journal of Language and Linguistics 4, no. 4 (December 2017): 63–69.
- Tariq Yousef (2019), "Ugarit: Translation Alignment Visualization". LEVIA’19: Leipzig Symposium on Visualization in Applications 2019. Leipzig. Available: https://osf.io/thsp5.
- Digital Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum (DFHG): https://www.dfhg-project.org/
- DFHG Automatic Translation Alignment: https://ugarit.ialigner.com/dfhg/
- Automatic Translation Alignment of Ancient Greek Texts: https://huggingface.co/UGARIT/grc-alignment
- Ugarit Translation Alignment Editor: https://ugarit.ialigner.com/
- Ugarit Automatic Alignment Tool (Beta): http://ugarit-aligner.com/
- Alignment Gold Standards for Ancient Greek (including guidelines): https://github.com/UgaritAlignment/Alignment-Gold-Standards
Option 1) Use the Automatic Alignment Tool provided (http://ugarit-aligner.com/) to automatically align a short sentence or text. You can select a short fragment from the DHFG corpus, a verset of the Bible, or a line of the Iliad among the resources provided. Evaluate the output of the automatic aligner: discuss why something is not aligned, why something may be incorrect or inaccurate, and so on.
Option 2) Work with a partner and align the same text manually on the Ugarit Editor (https://ugarit.ialigner.com/). You can follow the Guidelines provided in our resources, or make your own. After you complete the alignments, compare them and evaluate the agreement and disagreement. Why are there differences? How do Guidelines contribute to solving potential issues? Where did you have the most disagreement?
Sample Corpora
- DHFG: https://www.dfhg-project.org/
- Scaife Viewer: Iliad and its various translations in English: https://scaife.perseus.org/library/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0012.tlg001/
- Bible Corpus: https://github.com/christos-c/bible-corpus/tree/master/bibles