Historical Languages, Corpora, and Computational Methods

Abstract

This chapter explores the challenges of developing the field of Latin Computational Linguistics. Computational Linguistics aims at designing, implementing, and applying computational models for natural languages. A large part of Computational Linguistics research has been developed for English, or at least tested on this language. A crucial aspect of a fruitful exchange between the disciplines of Latin Linguistics and Computational Linguistics concerns the way Latin texts are collected, accessed, and investigated for linguistic analyses. So, any attempt into Latin Computational Linguistics is likely to start from corpora. Annotation provides each word form in a sentence with one or more labels that mark its attributes; for example, a morpho-syntactic annotation would add a 'genitive' tag to puellarum. The chapter advocates the use of corpora in Latin Linguistics by reporting on research based on Latin treebanks, to show their potential for Historical Linguistics research.Keywords: historical corpora; historical languages; historical Linguistics research; Latin Computational Linguistics; morpho-syntactic annotation