Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit. Detecting Latin Allusions to Ancient Greek Literature

Frederick Riemenschneider, Anette Frank


Abstract
Intertextual allusions hold a pivotal role in Classical Philology, with Latin authors frequently referencing Ancient Greek texts. Until now, the automatic identification of these intertextual references has been constrained to monolingual approaches, seeking parallels solely within Latin or Greek texts. In this study, we introduce SPhilBERTa, a trilingual Sentence-RoBERTa model tailored for Classical Philology, which excels at cross-lingual semantic comprehension and identification of identical sentences across Ancient Greek, Latin, and English. We generate new training data by automatically translating English into Ancient Greek texts. Further, we present a case study, demonstrating SPhilBERTa’s capability to facilitate automated detection of intertextual parallels. Intertextual allusions hold a pivotal role in Classical Philology, with Latin authors frequently referencing Ancient Greek texts. Until now, the automatic identification of these intertextual references has been constrained to monolingual approaches, seeking parallels solely within Latin or Greek texts. In this study, we introduce SPhilBERTa, a trilingual Sentence-RoBERTa model tailored for Classical Philology, which excels at cross-lingual semantic comprehension and identification of identical sentences across Ancient Greek, Latin, and English. We generate new training data by automatically translating English into Ancient Greek texts. Further, we present a case study, demonstrating SPhilBERTa’s capability to facilitate automated detection of intertextual parallels.
Anthology ID:
2023.alp-1.4
Volume:
Proceedings of the Ancient Language Processing Workshop
Month:
September
Year:
2023
Address:
Varna, Bulgaria
Editors:
Adam Anderson, Shai Gordin, Bin Li, Yudong Liu, Marco C. Passarotti
Venues:
ALP | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria
Note:
Pages:
30–38
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.alp-1.4
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Frederick Riemenschneider and Anette Frank. 2023. Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit. Detecting Latin Allusions to Ancient Greek Literature. In Proceedings of the Ancient Language Processing Workshop, pages 30–38, Varna, Bulgaria. INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria.
Cite (Informal):
Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit. Detecting Latin Allusions to Ancient Greek Literature (Riemenschneider & Frank, ALP-WS 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.alp-1.4.pdf