Kyle P. Johnson


2021

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The Classical Language Toolkit: An NLP Framework for Pre-Modern Languages
Kyle P. Johnson | Patrick J. Burns | John Stewart | Todd Cook | Clément Besnier | William J. B. Mattingly
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations

This paper announces version 1.0 of the Classical Language Toolkit (CLTK), an NLP framework for pre-modern languages. The vast majority of NLP, its algorithms and software, is created with assumptions particular to living languages, thus neglecting certain important characteristics of largely non-spoken historical languages. Further, scholars of pre-modern languages often have different goals than those of living-language researchers. To fill this void, the CLTK adapts ideas from several leading NLP frameworks to create a novel software architecture that satisfies the unique needs of pre-modern languages and their researchers. Its centerpiece is a modular processing pipeline that balances the competing demands of algorithmic diversity with pre-configured defaults. The CLTK currently provides pipelines, including models, for almost 20 languages.