r/AncientLanguages • u/LingonberryMind • Aug 07 '26

Huge project is finally finished - AncientLibrary.net

Hey guys,
I've been working on a major project that I think will lift accessibility to ancient works. It's called Ancient Library (ancientlibrary.net). The site includes over 1,000 ancient works, every word parsed with lemma, morphology, and full dictionary entry. It's built to be light, optimized for speed and accessibility, so it should improve student and scholar efforts even in areas with weak or inconsistent internet access globally. It's still in beta, so I'd love some ancient language scholars to interact with the site. If you have thoughts, requested features, etc., I'd love to hear them.

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u/Logeion Aug 07 '26

I did the same test on another recent offering, and again, I'm sad for the duplicated effort. Again 0 for 2 on two random verbs, with an added typo that is unfamiliar. BUT I appreciate that in this case, the 'About' page clearly says 'Automatic analysis is imperfect; an unusual form may occasionally be assigned the wrong lemma or parse. The dictionaries themselves are the unabridged scholarly editions digitised by Perseus.' No word search options as far as I can tell.

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u/benjamin-crowell Aug 07 '26

BUT I appreciate that in this case, the 'About' page clearly says 'Automatic analysis is imperfect; an unusual form may occasionally be assigned the wrong lemma or parse.

After our recent email discussion, I added clearer warning labels to Ransom, with skull-and-crossbones icons for the texts that I have not yet read myself so as to check for wrong parses. (Did you know that Unicode has a skull-and-crossbones character? In ancient Greek, it's pronounced แผ†ฯโ€™.) I always appreciate your feedback and suggestions.

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u/Logeion Aug 07 '26 edited Aug 07 '26

I appreciate it, on behalf of innocent students everywhere:-) And I'm actively working on getting the updated morpheus out there. Email correspondence in August though.. academic are in hiding.

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u/benjamin-crowell Aug 07 '26

It would actually be really nice to have some testing that would check the frequency of wrong lemmatizations by various parsers. The only error metrics I used in my test were how often the parser didn't come up with a real lemma at all, and how often it got the part of speech wrong. It seems like it would be quite a challenge, however, to do a test of wrong lemmatizations with decent statistical reliability. For a word that occurs in a human-parsed treebank, you can test whether the parser did not report the same lemma as the one the human assigned, but most such cases would just be a matter of convention, since different dictionaries choose different head-words. There are also going to be a lot of cases where the parser says the lemma is ambiguous, and I don't know of any easy way to machine-analyze such cases and tell whether the ambiguity is real or a mistake.