BERT in Plutarch’s Shadows
Ivan Yamshchikov, Alexey Tikhonov, Yorgos Pantis, Charlotte Schubert, Jürgen Jost
Abstract
The extensive surviving corpus of the ancient scholar Plutarch of Chaeronea (ca. 45-120 CE) also contains several texts which, according to current scholarly opinion, did not originate with him and are therefore attributed to an anonymous author Pseudo-Plutarch. These include, in particular, the work Placita Philosophorum (Quotations and Opinions of the Ancient Philosophers), which is extremely important for the history of ancient philosophy. Little is known about the identity of that anonymous author and its relation to other authors from the same period. This paper presents a BERT language model for Ancient Greek. The model discovers previously unknown statistical properties relevant to these literary, philosophical, and historical problems and can shed new light on this authorship question. In particular, the Placita Philosophorum, together with one of the other Pseudo-Plutarch texts, shows similarities with the texts written by authors from an Alexandrian context (2nd/3rd century CE).- Anthology ID:
- 2022.emnlp-main.407
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
- Month:
- December
- Year:
- 2022
- Address:
- Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
- Editors:
- Yoav Goldberg, Zornitsa Kozareva, Yue Zhang
- Venue:
- EMNLP
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 6071–6080
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.407
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2022.emnlp-main.407
- Cite (ACL):
- Ivan Yamshchikov, Alexey Tikhonov, Yorgos Pantis, Charlotte Schubert, and Jürgen Jost. 2022. BERT in Plutarch’s Shadows. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 6071–6080, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- BERT in Plutarch’s Shadows (Yamshchikov et al., EMNLP 2022)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-2023-videos/2022.emnlp-main.407.pdf