Ambiguity and automatic disambiguation of the Latin prepositions in the third book of the Clavis Prophetarum

Abstract

The third book of Clavis Prophetarum [The Prophets’ Key] by Father Antonio Vieira, S. J. (1608-1697), in its Latin version, reedited by the Portuguese National Library in 2000 – a critical edition by Arnaldo Espirito Santo – constitutes the corpus of this work. In order to be able to work on a corpus of a given language, we need formalized electronic linguistic resources in order to obtain the greatest possible coverage and that can be used in appropriate systems. If, for the Portuguese language, we already have trustworthy resources developed since the 1990s by LabEL (Laboratory of Linguistic Engineering), as to the Latin language, we cannot mention the same. In fact, the use of automatic text analysis software is not yet a common practice, it is limited to restricted research circles. However, this is an area whose growing importance and potential for language teaching fully justify all the effort to disseminate it, so that more people are interested in investing and making it an added value in research. This article is a small contribution to this aim and has as main goals to help elaborate rules of automatic disambiguation of prepositions and their syntagms, in the Latin version of Clavis Prophetarum. It is also intended to evaluate the effectiveness of its application, in order to allow later reliable approaches in the study of this category in the corpus, using automatic techniques.