Clément Besnier


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.

2020

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History to Myths: Social Network Analysis for Comparison of Stories over Time
Clément Besnier
Proceedings of the 4th Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature

We discuss on how related stories can be compared by their characters. We investigate character graphs, or social networks, in order to measure evolution of character importance over time. To illustrate this, we chose the Siegfried-Sigurd myth that may come from a Merovingian king named Sigiberthus. The Nibelungenlied, the Völsunga saga and the History of the Franks are the three resources used.