Towards a Greek Proverb Atlas: Computational Spatial Exploration and Attribution of Greek Proverbs

John Pavlopoulos, Panos Louridas, Panagiotis Filos


Abstract
Proverbs carry wisdom transferred orally from generation to generation. Based on the place they were recorded, this study introduces a publicly-available and machine-actionable dataset of more than one hundred thousand Greek proverb variants. By quantifying the spatial distribution of proverbs, we show that the most widespread proverbs come from the mainland while the least widespread proverbs come primarily from the islands. By focusing on the least dispersed proverbs, we present the most frequent tokens per location and undertake a benchmark in geographical attribution, using text classification and regression (text geocoding). Our results show that this is a challenging task for which specific locations can be attributed more successfully compared to others. The potential of our resource and benchmark is showcased by two novel applications. First, we extracted terms moving the regression prediction toward the four cardinal directions. Second, we leveraged conformal prediction to attribute 3,676 unregistered proverbs with statistically rigorous predictions of locations each of these proverbs was possibly registered in.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.661
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
11842–11854
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.661/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-main.661
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
John Pavlopoulos, Panos Louridas, and Panagiotis Filos. 2024. Towards a Greek Proverb Atlas: Computational Spatial Exploration and Attribution of Greek Proverbs. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 11842–11854, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Towards a Greek Proverb Atlas: Computational Spatial Exploration and Attribution of Greek Proverbs (Pavlopoulos et al., EMNLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.661.pdf