Loci Similes: A Benchmark for Extracting Intertextualities in Latin Literature

Julian Schelb, Michael Wittweiler, Marie Revellio, Barbara Feichtinger, Andreas Spitz


Abstract
Tracing connections between historical texts is an important part of intertextual research, enabling scholars to reconstruct the virtual library of a writer and identify the sources influencing their creative process. These intertextual links manifest in diverse forms, ranging from direct verbatim quotations to subtle allusions and paraphrases disguised by morphological variation. Language models offer a promising path forward due to their capability of capturing semantic similarity beyond lexical overlap. However, the development of new methods for this task is held back by the scarcity of standardized benchmarks and easy-to-use datasets. We address this gap by introducing Loci Similes, a benchmark for Latin intertextuality detection comprising a curated dataset of ~176k text segments and 1,490 expert-verified parallels, including 945 labeled references from an existing dataset. Using this data, we establish baselines for retrieval and classification of intertextualities with both lexical methods and pretrained encoder language models.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-emnlp.1224
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
25899–25924
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.1224/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Julian Schelb, Michael Wittweiler, Marie Revellio, Barbara Feichtinger, and Andreas Spitz. 2026. Loci Similes: A Benchmark for Extracting Intertextualities in Latin Literature. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026, pages 25899–25924, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Loci Similes: A Benchmark for Extracting Intertextualities in Latin Literature (Schelb et al., Findings 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.1224.pdf