Alek Keersmaekers


2022

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In Search of the Flocks: How to Perform Onomasiological Queries in an Ancient Greek Corpus?
Alek Keersmaekers | Toon Van Hal
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Language Technologies for Historical and Ancient Languages

This paper explores the possibilities of onomasiologically querying corpus data of Ancient Greek. The significance of the onomasiological approach has been highlighted in recent studies, yet the possibilities of performing ‘word-finding’ investigations into corpus data have not been dealt with in depth. The case study chosen focuses on collective nouns denoting animate groups (such as flocks of people, herds of cattle). By relying on a large automatically annotated corpus of Ancient Greek and on token-based vector information, a longlist of collective nouns was compiled through morpho-syntactic extraction and successive clustering procedures. After reducing this longlist to a shortlist, the results obtained are evaluated. In general, we find that πλῆθος can be considered to be the default collective noun of both humans and animals, becoming especially prominent during the Hellenistic period. In addition, specific tendencies in the use of collective nouns are discerned for specific semantic classes (e.g. gods and insects) and over time. Throughout the paper, special attention is paid to methodological issues related to onomasiologically searching.

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An ELECTRA Model for Latin Token Tagging Tasks
Wouter Mercelis | Alek Keersmaekers
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Language Technologies for Historical and Ancient Languages

This report describes the KU Leuven / Brepols-CTLO submission to EvaLatin 2022. We present the results of our current small Latin ELECTRA model, which will be expanded to a larger model in the future. For the lemmatization task, we combine a neural token-tagging approach with the in-house rule-based lemma lists from Brepols’ ReFlex software. The results are decent, but suffer from inconsistencies between Brepols’ and EvaLatin’s definitions of a lemma. For POS-tagging, the results come up just short from the first place in this competition, mainly struggling with proper nouns. For morphological tagging, there is much more room for improvement. Here, the constraints added to our Multiclass Multilabel model were often not tight enough, causing missing morphological features. We will further investigate why the combination of the different morphological features, which perform fine on their own, leads to issues.

2021

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The GLAUx corpus: methodological issues in designing a long-term, diverse, multi-layered corpus of Ancient Greek
Alek Keersmaekers
Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change 2021

This paper describes the GLAUx project (“the Greek Language Automated”), an ongoing effort to develop a large long-term diachronic corpus of Greek, covering sixteen centuries of literary and non-literary material annotated with NLP methods. After providing an overview of related corpus projects and discussing the general architecture of the corpus, it zooms in on a number of larger methodological issues in the design of historical corpora. These include the encoding of textual variants, handling extralinguistic variation and annotating linguistic ambiguity. Finally, the long- and short-term perspectives of this project are discussed.

2020

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Automatic semantic role labeling in Ancient Greek using distributional semantic modeling
Alek Keersmaekers
Proceedings of LT4HALA 2020 - 1st Workshop on Language Technologies for Historical and Ancient Languages

This paper describes a first attempt to automatic semantic role labeling in Ancient Greek, using a supervised machine learning approach. A Random Forest classifier is trained on a small semantically annotated corpus of Ancient Greek, annotated with a large amount of linguistic features, including form of the construction, morphology, part-of-speech, lemmas, animacy, syntax and distributional vectors of Greek words. These vectors turned out to be more important in the model than any other features, likely because they are well suited to handle a low amount of training examples. Overall labeling accuracy was 0.757, with large differences with respect to the specific role that was labeled and with respect to text genre. Some ways to further improve these results include expanding the amount of training examples, improving the quality of the distributional vectors and increasing the consistency of the syntactic annotation.

2019

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Creating, Enriching and Valorizing Treebanks of Ancient Greek
Alek Keersmaekers | Wouter Mercelis | Colin Swaelens | Toon Van Hal
Proceedings of the 18th International Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories (TLT, SyntaxFest 2019)