Coptic SCRIPTORIUM Blog

Author: Amir Zeldes (page 1 of 3)

New Corpora Release 4.4.0

September 30, 2022 / / 0 Comments
Searching for Greek words in Shenoute’s So Concerning the Little Place

We are pleased to announce release 4.4.0 of Coptic Scriptorium! Our data now includes over 1,267,000 tokens of searchable, linguistically analyzed Coptic data from dozens of ancient Coptic works (an increase of almost 100,000 tokens from the previous release). We are very grateful to all of our collaborators and contributors, without whom this project could not function.

This release corrects a large number of consistency errors identified in our existing data, and also adds some new documents:

We would like to thank the Marcion Project for making the underlying digitized text of Pistis Sophia available, and all of the annotators for their hard work. Tamara Siuda, Rebecca Krawiec, Philippe Zaher, and Lance Martin contributed, in addition to Amir and Carrie. As our current DHAG grant ends, we would like to give special thanks to Lance, who has been working as our DH specialist on the project since 2019, for doing an amazing job of keeping track of all the data and the various tasks he’s been in charge of over the past three years!

As with all releases, raw machine readable data for all corpora can be found, including morphological and syntactic analysis, as well as named entity recognition and entity linking, on our GitHub repository, in a variety of popular formats:

https://github.com/copticscriptorium/corpora

You can also search for complex linguistic annotations in the data using our ANNIS server – please see our new tutorial here to get started with some query tips and a helpful cheat sheet:

https://copticscriptorium.org/ANNIS_tutorial

We hope this release will be useful and look forward to the next one as always!

New Corpora Release 4.3.0

May 3, 2022 / / 0 Comments

The opening lines of Pistis Sophia

It is our pleasure to announce release 4.3.0 of Coptic Scriptorium corpora, which currently cover over 1,175,000 tokens of searchable, linguistically analyzed Coptic data from dozens of ancient Coptic works. New in this release:

Corrections and additional annotations:

  • Pilot work adding partial Arabic translations (work by Philippe Zaher)
  • Improvements and error corrections to a variety of works (including Because of You Too O Prince of Evil, Dormition of John, Book of Ruth and Homilies of Proclus)

The newly released material encompasses over 57,000 tokens of semi-automatically annotated data. We would like to give special thanks to the Marcion Project for making much of the underlying digitized text available, and the annotators whose hard work has made this release possible. As with all releases, raw machine readable data for all corpora can be found, including morphological and syntactic analysis, as well as named entity recognition and entity linking, on our GitHub repository, in a variety of popular formats:

https://github.com/copticscriptorium/corpora

We hope this release will be useful and look forward to the next one!

New Corpora Release 4.2.0

September 30, 2021 / / 0 Comments
Automatic linguistic analysis and Entity Linking from I Samuel 25

It is our pleasure to announce the latest data release from Coptic Scriptorium, version 4.2.0. This release contains both new Coptic material and additions to older datasets, as well as expanding our entity annotations and named-entity linking to all of our data, including the semi-automatically annotated Old Testament. The also means automatic updates to all of our interfaces, such as the recently added example usage functionality in the Coptic Dictionary Online, which is linked to the corpora.

The new material, including more digitized data courtesy of the Marcion project, as well as manually digitized and corrected OCR data from out of print editions includes:

With this new release, the semi-automatically annotated data (excluding automatically processed Bible materials) in the project covers close to 300,000 words of Sahidic Coptic annotated for entities.

This release represents a tremendous amount of work over the past few months by the Coptic Scriptorium team. We would also like to thank individual contributors (which you can always find in the ‘annotation’ metadata for each document), and specifically So Miyagawa for help with Coptic OCR models, as well as the Marcion and CoptOT project for sharing their data with us, and the National Endowment for the Humanities for supporting us. We are continuing to work on more data, links to other resources and new kinds of annotations and tools. Please let us know if you have any feedback!

Comprehensive Coptic Lexicon v1.2

October 1, 2020 / / 0 Comments

The “Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae” project (“Strukturen und Transformationen des Wortschatzes der ägyptischen Sprache”, BBAW), the “Database and Dictionary of Greek Loanwords in Coptic” (DDGLC, Freie Universität Berlin), and “Coptic Scriptorium: Digital Research in Coptic Language and Literature” are pleased to announce the latest release of the “Comprehensive Coptic Lexicon”: Version 1.2. The raw data can be downloaded from: 

  • D. Burns, F. Feder, K. John, M. Kupreyev, et al. 2020-07-24. Comprehensive Coptic Lexicon: Including Loanwords from Ancient Greek, Berlin: Freie Universität Berlin, http://dx.doi.org/10.17169/refubium-27566

The processed data has been published by the 

The major new features include: 

  • Standardized use of parentheses “( )” in word forms.
  • Optimizated data structure (e.g., <sense/> element now contains a unique ID, facilitating the ongoing work on linking CCL to the databases of semantic relations such as Coptic WordNet).
  • Correction of orthographic, grammatical and semantic information of the existing entries and addition of new entries.
  • Linking to Perseus Greek morphology tool via the Greek head words. DDGLC lemma IDs are now displayed in the entry view of Coptic Dictionary Online.
  • Improved usability of the section of Greek loanwords due to exclusion or change of a number of  senses.
  • Link to attestation search for nouns filtered by entity-type (e.g., search for ⲟⲩⲟⲛ standing for a person, an animal, or an inanimate object) in Coptic Scriptorium.
  • Phrase network visualization of most common word sequences containing nouns, verbs and prepositions.

For the full description of the Version 1.2 please refer to the the “Release Notes”: https://refubium.fu-berlin.de/bitstream/handle/fub188/27813/Comprehensive_Coptic_Lexicon_v1.2_Release_Notes.pdf?sequence=5&isAllowed=y 


The Comprehensive Coptic Lexicon V 1.2 now contains 11263 entries and 31847 forms of Egyptian-Coptic and Greek-Coptic datasets. TLA, DDGLC and Coptic Scriptorium invite you to take a look at the new data and would welcome your feedback.

Summer 2020 Corpora Release 4.0.0

August 31, 2020 / / 0 Comments
Place name index on data.copticscriptorium.org

It is our great pleasure to announce the latest release of data from Coptic Scriptorium, version 4.0.0. This release contains both new Coptic material and extensive additions to our suite of tools and annotations, focusing on the addition of support for entity annotation and named-entity linking across our new and old datasets. The new material, including more digitized data courtesy of the Marcion project and other scholars, includes:

With this new release, the semi-automatically annotated data (excluding automatically processed Bible materials) in the project covers close to 260,000 words of Sahidic Coptic annotated for entities, including 50,000 words of gold-standard treebanked data with manual syntactic analyses.

In addition to new texts, new tools and analyses have been added to the project:

  • Complete entity annotation, classifying all non-pronominal references to people, places and other entities into 10 entity categories
  • Entity linking:
    • Linking of all named entities which have corresponding Wikipedia articles to their respective Wikipedia entries, including geo-location information where available
    • A browseable index of people and places mentioned in the texts, also linked to Wikipedia and Google Maps and including both real and fictional entities
  • Search and visualization:
    • Search by entity type and named entity in ANNIS
    • New configurable analytic visualization which displays nested entity types, highlights named entities and links them to Wikipedia
  • Natural Language Processing
    • Automatic entity recognition is now available (work by Amir Zeldes, Lance Martin and Sichang Tu)
    • A new neural parser adapted for Coptic with higher accuracy syntactic analyses, which are deployed in ANNIS (work by Luke Gessler)
The new configurable Analytic Visualization with toggleable entity types and links

This release represents a tremendous amount of work over the past few months by the entire Coptic Scriptorium team. We would also like to thank individual contributors (which you can always find in the ‘annotation’ metadata for each document) and the Marcion and PAThs projects who shared their data with us, and the National Endowment for the Humanities for supporting us. We are continuing to work on more data, links to other resources and new kinds of annotations and tools. Please let us know if you have any feedback!

Digital Coptic 3 – program online!

June 25, 2020 / / 1 Comment

The program for the third edition of Digital Coptic is now online. Check out the workshop website for the list of projects, talks and presenters.

Please join us for the workshop on July 12 and 13 – participants will receive a Zoom link and password for interactive presentations and discussion, and the workshop will also be cast to YouTube for larger audiences and offline viewing after the workshop. We look forward to hearing all the talks!

Entities in the Coptic Treebank

June 1, 2020 / / 0 Comments

entities

With the release of Version 2.6 of Universal Dependencies, our focus has shifted to handling Named and Non-Named Entity Recognition (NER/NNER) in Coptic data. As a result of intensive work by the Coptic Scriptorium team in the past few months, the development branch of the Treebank now contains complete entity spans and types for the entire data in the Treebank, which can be accessed here. Special thanks are due to Lance Martin, Liz Davidson and Mitchell Abrams for all their efforts!

What’s included?

  • All data from the Coptic treebank (78 documents, approx. 46,000 words)
  • All spans of text referring to a named or unnamed entity, such as “Emperor Diocletian”, “the old woman” or “his cell”.
  • Nested entities contained in other entities, such a [the kingdom of [the Emperor Diocletian]]
  • Entity types, divided into the following 10 classes: (English examples are provided in brackets)

 

What do we plan to do with this?

Entity annotations are a gateway to exposing and linking semantic content information from collections of documents. Having such annotations for all of our Coptic data will allow search by entity types (and ultimately names), enable analysis and comparison of texts based on the quantity, proportion and dispersion of entity types, facilitate identification of textual reuse disregarding either the entities involved or the ways in which they are phrased, and much more.

Over the course of the summer, our next goals fall into three packages:

  1. Natural Language Processing (NLP): Develop high-accuracy automatic entity recognition tools for Coptic based on this data, and make them freely available.
  2. Corpora: Enrich all of our available data with automatic entity annotations, which can be corrected and improved iteratively in the future.
  3. Entity linking: Leverage the inventory of named entities identified in the data to carry out named entity linking with resources such as Wikipedia and other DH project identifiers. This will allow users to find all mentions of a specific person or place, regardless of how they are referred to.

Since the tools and annotations are based only on Coptic textual input and subsequent automatic NLP, we envision including search and visualization of entity data for all of our corpora, including ones for which we do not have a translation. This means that data whose content could not be easily deciphered without extensive reading of the original Coptic text will become much more easily discoverable, by exploring entities in which researchers are interested.

Stay tuned for more updates on Coptic entities!

Universal Dependencies 2.6 released!

May 18, 2020 / / 0 Comments

tree

Check out the new Universal Dependencies (UD) release V2.6! This is the twelfth release of the annotated treebanks at http://universaldependencies.org/.  The project now covers syntactically annotated corpora in 92 languages, including Coptic. The size of the Coptic Treebank is now around 43,000 words, and growing. For the latest version of the Coptic data, see our development branch here: https://github.com/UniversalDependencies/UD_Coptic-Scriptorium/tree/dev. For documentation, see the UD Coptic annotation guidelines.

The inclusion of the Coptic Treebank in the UD dataset means that many standard parsers and other NLP tools trained on all well attested UD languages now support Coptic out-of-the-box, including Stanford NLP’s Stanza and UFAL’s UDPipe. Feel free to try out these libraries for your data! For optimal performance on open domain Coptic text, we still recommend our custom tool-chain, Coptic-NLP, which is highly optimized to Coptic and uses additional resources beyond the treebank. Or try it out online:

Coptic-NLP demo

 

Winter 2020 Corpora Release 3.1.0

March 16, 2020 / / 0 Comments

It is our pleasure to announce a new data release, with a variety of new sources from our collaborators (including more digitized data courtesy of the Marcion and PAThs projects and other scholars). New in this release are:

All documents have metadata for word segmentation, tagging, and parsing to indicate whether those annotations are machine annotations only (automatic), checked for accuracy by an expert in Coptic (checked), or closely reviewed for accuracy, usually as a result of manual parsing (gold).

You can search all corpora using ANNIS and download the data in 4 formats (relANNIS database files, PAULA XML files, TEI XML files, and SGML files in Tree-tagger format): browse on GitHub. If you just want to read works, cite project data or browse metadata, you can use our updated repository browser, the Canonical Text Services browser and URN resolver:

http://data.copticscriptorium.org/

The new material in this release includes some 78,000 tokens in 33 documents and represents a tremendous amount of work by our project members and collaborators. We would like to thank the individual contributors (which you can find in the ‘annotation’ metadata), the Marcion and PAThs projects who shared their data with us, and the National Endowment for the Humanities for supporting us. We are continuing to work on more data, links to other resources and new kinds of annotations and tools, which we plan to make available in the summer. Please let us know if you have any feedback!

The Coptic Dictionary Online wins the 2019 DH Award for Best Tool

March 16, 2020 / / 0 Comments

We are very happy to announce that the Coptic Dictionary Online (CDO) has won the 2019 Digital Humanities Award in the category Best Tool or Suite of Tools! The dictionary interface, shown below, gives users access to searches by Coptic word forms, definitions in three languages (English, French and German), pattern and part of speech searches, and more. We have also added links to quantitative corpus data, including attestation and collocation analyses from data published by Coptic Scriptorium.

The dictionary is the result of a collaboration between Coptic Scriptorium and lexicographers in Germany at the Berlin-Brandenburg and Göttingen Academies of Science, the Free University in Berlin, and the Universities of Göttingen and Leipzig. This collaboration has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the German Research Foundation (DFG).

To read more about the dictionary’s structure and creation, see Feder et al. (2018).

A view of the Coptic Dictionary Online

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