SageBook: Toward a cross-generational social network for the Jewish sages’ prosopography

Abstract

Abstract In this research we devised and implemented a semi-automatic approach for building a SageBook–a cross-generational social network of the Jewish sages from the Rabbinic literature. The proposed methodology is based on a shallow argumentation analysis leading to detection of lexical–syntactic patterns which represent different relationships between the sages in the text. The method was successfully applied and evaluated on the corpus of the Mishna, the first written work of the Rabbinic Literature which provides the foundation to the Jewish law development. The constructed prosopographical database and the network generated from its data enable a large-scale quantitative analysis of the sages and their related data, and therefore might contribute to the research of the Talmudic literature and evolution of the Jewish thought throughout the two last millennia.