Daniel G. Swanson


2024

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Converting Legacy Data to CLDF: A FAIR Exit Strategy for Linguistic Web Apps
Robert Forkel | Daniel G. Swanson | Steven Moran
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)

In the mid 2000s, there were several large-scale US National Science Foundation (NSF) grants awarded to projects aiming at developing digital infrastructure and standards for different forms of linguistics data. For example, MultiTree encoded language family trees as phylogenies in XML and LL-MAP converted detailed geographic maps of endangered languages into KML. As early stand-alone website applications, these projects allowed researchers interested in comparative linguistics to explore language genealogies and areality, respectively. However as time passed, the technologies that supported these web apps became deprecated, unsupported, and inaccessible. Here we take a future-oriented approach to digital obsolescence and illustrate how to convert legacy linguistic resources into FAIR data via the Cross-Linguistic Data Formats (CLDF). CLDF is built on the W3C recommendations Model for Tabular Data and Metadata on the Web and Metadata Vocabulary for Tabular Data developed by the CSVW (CSV on the Web) working group. Thus, each dataset is modeled as a set of tabular data files described by metadata in JSON. These standards and the tools built to validate and manipulate them provide an accessible and extensible format for converting legacy linguistic web apps into FAIR datasets.

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Producing a Parallel Universal Dependencies Treebank of Ancient Hebrew and Ancient Greek via Cross-Lingual Projection
Daniel G. Swanson | Bryce D. Bussert | Francis Tyers
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)

In this paper we present the initial construction of a treebank of Ancient Greek containing portions of the Septuagint, a translation of the Hebrew Scriptures (1576 sentences, 39K tokens, roughly 7% of the total corpus). We construct the treebank by word-aligning and projecting from the parallel text in Ancient Hebrew before automatically correcting systematic syntactic mismatches and manually correcting other errors.

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Towards Named-Entity and Coreference Annotation of the Hebrew Bible
Daniel G. Swanson | Bryce D. Bussert | Francis Tyers
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Language Technologies for Historical and Ancient Languages (LT4HALA) @ LREC-COLING-2024

Named-entity annotation refers to the process of specifying what real-world (or, at least, external-to-the-text) entities various names and descriptions within a text refer to. Coreference annotation, meanwhile, specifies what context-dependent words or phrases, such as pronouns refer to. This paper describes an ongoing project to apply both of these to the Hebrew Bible, so far covering most of the book of Genesis, fully marking every person, place, object, and point in time which occurs in the text. The annotation process and possible future uses for the data are covered, along with the challenges involved in applying existing annotation guidelines to the Hebrew text.