Detecting Narrative Patterns in Biblical Hebrew and Greek

Hope McGovern, Hale Sirin, Tom Lippincott, Andrew Caines


Abstract
We present a novel approach to extracting recurring narrative patterns, or type-scenes, in Biblical Hebrew and Biblical Greek with an information retrieval network. We use cross-references to train an encoder model to create similar representations for verses linked by a cross-reference. We then query our trained model with phrases informed by humanities scholarship and designed to elicit particular kinds of narrative scenes. Our models can surface relevant instances in the top-10 ranked candidates in many cases.Through manual error analysis and discussion, we address the limitations and challenges inherent in our approach. Our findings contribute to the field of Biblical scholarship by offering a new perspective on narrative analysis within ancient texts, and to computational modeling of narrative with a genre-agnostic approach for pattern-finding in long, literary texts.
Anthology ID:
2024.ml4al-1.26
Volume:
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Machine Learning for Ancient Languages (ML4AL 2024)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Hybrid in Bangkok, Thailand and online
Editors:
John Pavlopoulos, Thea Sommerschield, Yannis Assael, Shai Gordin, Kyunghyun Cho, Marco Passarotti, Rachele Sprugnoli, Yudong Liu, Bin Li, Adam Anderson
Venues:
ML4AL | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
269–279
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.ml4al-1.26
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.ml4al-1.26
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hope McGovern, Hale Sirin, Tom Lippincott, and Andrew Caines. 2024. Detecting Narrative Patterns in Biblical Hebrew and Greek. In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Machine Learning for Ancient Languages (ML4AL 2024), pages 269–279, Hybrid in Bangkok, Thailand and online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Detecting Narrative Patterns in Biblical Hebrew and Greek (McGovern et al., ML4AL-WS 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.ml4al-1.26.pdf