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Fast paraphrase extraction in Ancient Greek literature

  • Marcus Pöckelmann

    Marcus Pöckelmann studied computer science at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (Master of Science 2013) and has been a member of the research group Molitor/Ritter since 2013. Within several interdisciplinary research projects he develops web-based applications for the investigation of intertextuality together with colleagues from different disciplines of the humanities. These include the working environments LERA for the analysis of complex text variants for scholarly editions, and Paraphrasis for the retrieval and evaluation of paraphrased text passages in the ancient Greek literature.

    , Janis Dähne

    Janis Dähne is a student of computer science at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. He was jointly responsible for the implementation of the approach presented here. In his master thesis, Janis Dähne deals with the alignation of text variants based on linear programs.

    , Jörg Ritter

    Jörg Ritter studied Computer Science at the University of Saarland (Diplom 1997), he received his doctorate in technical computer science with a thesis on a pipelined architecture for partitioned discrete wavelet transformation based lossy image compression using FPGA’s. Since 1997, he is research associate in the group headed by Prof. Dr. Molitor at the Institute of Computer Science of Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. For more than 10 years, Jörg Ritter has been working with colleagues from philology in interdisciplinary projects dealing with humanities issues, e. g., Digital Plato. Tradition and Reception (2016-2019), A New Supplement Dictionary of Sanskrit (2013-2016), Epistolary Networks. Visualizing multi-dimensional information structures in correspondence corpora (2013-2016), Semi-automatic Difference Analysis of Complex Text Variants (2012-2015). Jörg Ritter was and is significantly involved in the establishment of a research focus “eHumanities” at the Institute of Computer Science of the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg.

    and Paul Molitor

    Paul Molitor studied Computer Science and Mathematics at the University of Saarland (Diplom 1982, Promotion 1986, Habilitation 1992). He was member of the scientific staff of Prof. Dr. Gunter Hotz (1982-1994) where he leads a project in the National Research Center 124 VLSI and Parallelism (1992-1994). In 1993, he was with the Humboldt University of Berlin as Associate Professor for Circuit Technology. Since 1994 he is a Full Professor for Technical Computer Science at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. Paul Molitor’s interests lie in addition to technical computer science in combinatorial optimization and computational humanities/eHumanities. Together with Jörg Ritter and colleagues from the humanities, he has been leading several interdisciplinary third-party funded projects in the field of Digital Humanities, in particular with colleagues from the fields of German Studies, Romance studies, Jewish studies, Sanskrit studies, and ancient history / ancient Greek studies.

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Abstract

In this paper,[0] we present a method for paraphrase extraction in Ancient Greek that can be applied to huge text corpora in interactive humanities applications. Since lexical databases and POS tagging are either unavailable or do not achieve sufficient accuracy for ancient languages, our approach is based on pure word embeddings and the word mover’s distance (WMD) [20]. We show how to adapt the WMD approach to paraphrase searching such that the expensive WMD computation has to be computed for a small fraction of the text segments contained in the corpus, only. Formally, the time complexity will be reduced from O(N·K3·log to O(N+K3·logK), compared to the brute-force approach which computes the WMD between each text segment of the corpus and the search query. N is the length of the corpus and K the size of its vocabulary. The method, which searches not only for paraphrases of the same length as the search query but also for paraphrases of varying lengths, was evaluated on the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae® (TLG®) [25]. The TLG consists of about 75·106 Greek words. We searched the whole TLG for paraphrases for given passages of Plato. The experimental results show that our method and the brute-force approach, with only very few exceptions, propose the same text passages in the TLG as possible paraphrases. The computation times of our method are in a range that allows its application in interactive systems and let the humanities scholars work productively and smoothly.

ACM CCS:

Funding statement: The project was funded by the Volkswagen Foundation within the framework of the Open – for the Extraordinary funding line from 2016 to 2019.

About the authors

Marcus Pöckelmann

Marcus Pöckelmann studied computer science at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (Master of Science 2013) and has been a member of the research group Molitor/Ritter since 2013. Within several interdisciplinary research projects he develops web-based applications for the investigation of intertextuality together with colleagues from different disciplines of the humanities. These include the working environments LERA for the analysis of complex text variants for scholarly editions, and Paraphrasis for the retrieval and evaluation of paraphrased text passages in the ancient Greek literature.

Janis Dähne

Janis Dähne is a student of computer science at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. He was jointly responsible for the implementation of the approach presented here. In his master thesis, Janis Dähne deals with the alignation of text variants based on linear programs.

Dr. Jörg Ritter

Jörg Ritter studied Computer Science at the University of Saarland (Diplom 1997), he received his doctorate in technical computer science with a thesis on a pipelined architecture for partitioned discrete wavelet transformation based lossy image compression using FPGA’s. Since 1997, he is research associate in the group headed by Prof. Dr. Molitor at the Institute of Computer Science of Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. For more than 10 years, Jörg Ritter has been working with colleagues from philology in interdisciplinary projects dealing with humanities issues, e. g., Digital Plato. Tradition and Reception (2016-2019), A New Supplement Dictionary of Sanskrit (2013-2016), Epistolary Networks. Visualizing multi-dimensional information structures in correspondence corpora (2013-2016), Semi-automatic Difference Analysis of Complex Text Variants (2012-2015). Jörg Ritter was and is significantly involved in the establishment of a research focus “eHumanities” at the Institute of Computer Science of the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg.

Prof. Dr. Paul Molitor

Paul Molitor studied Computer Science and Mathematics at the University of Saarland (Diplom 1982, Promotion 1986, Habilitation 1992). He was member of the scientific staff of Prof. Dr. Gunter Hotz (1982-1994) where he leads a project in the National Research Center 124 VLSI and Parallelism (1992-1994). In 1993, he was with the Humboldt University of Berlin as Associate Professor for Circuit Technology. Since 1994 he is a Full Professor for Technical Computer Science at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. Paul Molitor’s interests lie in addition to technical computer science in combinatorial optimization and computational humanities/eHumanities. Together with Jörg Ritter and colleagues from the humanities, he has been leading several interdisciplinary third-party funded projects in the field of Digital Humanities, in particular with colleagues from the fields of German Studies, Romance studies, Jewish studies, Sanskrit studies, and ancient history / ancient Greek studies.

Acknowledgment

We would like to thank Prof. Dr. Charlotte Schubert, Professor for Ancient History at the University Leipzig, her research fellows Dr. Roxana Kath and Dr. Michaela Rücker, and Dr. Eva Wöckener-Gade who is with the Institute of Classical Philology and Comparative Literature of the University Leipzig for the great collaboration.

We thank the anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of our manuscript and their helpful comments and suggestions.

We especially thank the Volkswagen Foundation for supporting the Digital Plato project.

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Received: 2019-10-31
Revised: 2020-02-21
Accepted: 2020-02-23
Published Online: 2020-03-06
Published in Print: 2020-04-26

© 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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