This paper presents a layered annotation workflow for the historical linguistic study of Semitic epigraphic texts. Using a curated Phoenician corpus primarily based on Kanaanäische und Aramäische Inschriften (KAI), the system models inscriptions as multi-layered objects that encode graphemic, morphosyntactic, phonological, semantic, and contextual information as independently queryable layers. Annotation is embedded in a structured editorial workflow supporting peer review, expert validation, version tracking, and the representation of variant readings and uncertainty. A case study demonstrates how recurring formulaic constructions can be modeled as morphosyntactic configurations retrievable across inscriptions. Although the current corpus is limited in scope, the data model is language-agnostic, designed for extension to other Semitic epigraphic traditions.

Levantine Arabic (LA) is spoken by tens of millions of people, creating a pressing need for shared benchmarks to evaluate LA speech-language technologies. Evaluating such technology is particularly challenging given LA’s internal diversity and its opaque and non-standardized orthography. We present SHAMS (SHami Annotated Multi-dialect Speech), a benchmark comprising 1,300 utterances drawn from open audio corpora, balanced across five LA varieties (Urban and Rural Palestinian, and Urban Jordanian, Lebanese, and Syrian). Each utterance is represented across four aligned tiers: audio, unvocalized orthography, diacritized text, and phonetic transcription. This structure supports evaluation of various downstream tasks such as diacritization, grapheme-to-phoneme conversion, automatic speech recognition, and audio-to-phoneme, grounded in audio and stratified by variety. We benchmark open and proprietary models across these tasks to demonstrate the utility of this benchmark for measuring progress across LA. We release SHAMS at https://shams-nlp.github.io.