Omri Drori
2026
Scaling Sentence Similarity for Classical Tibetan with Automatic Annotations
Shay Cohen | Jingyi Yang | Gal Rabinovitz | Sonam Choden | Ofir Shtrosberg | Nicola Bajetta | Goody Ben Horin | Rebecca Sundén | Omri Drori | Sonam Jamtsho | Dorji Wangchuk | Kfir Bar | Orna Almogi | Shai Fine
Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Natural Language Processing for the Digital Humanities
Shay Cohen | Jingyi Yang | Gal Rabinovitz | Sonam Choden | Ofir Shtrosberg | Nicola Bajetta | Goody Ben Horin | Rebecca Sundén | Omri Drori | Sonam Jamtsho | Dorji Wangchuk | Kfir Bar | Orna Almogi | Shai Fine
Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Natural Language Processing for the Digital Humanities
Identifying intertextual parallels is central to philology, traditionally requiring labor-intensive manual analysis. While digitized historical corpora enable automated approaches using semantic sentence embeddings, training such models requires large annotated datasets, which are scarce for low-resource languages. We address this challenge by introducing a scalable automatic annotation pipeline for training semantic embedding models for Classical Tibetan. Our method combines unsupervised contrastive bootstrapping with iterative pair mining, generating silver-standard similarity labels through two complementary annotation strategies: (1) an ensemble of embedding models and rerankers, and (2) an LLM-as-a-judge committee using best–worst scaling. When combined with a domain-specific, gold-standard annotated dataset for sequential fine-tuning, the resulting text-similarity model achieves a state-of-the-art Spearman correlation of 0.864 on the STS task. This enables effective semantic search in Classical Tibetan and provides a framework for automatic supervision in low-resource languages used in digital humanities. We will make our code, dataset, and trained model publicly available upon publication.
Automatic Segmentation of Classical Tibetan Texts into Autochthonous and Allochthonous Regions
Guy Bilitski | Lev Shechter | Sonam Jamtsho | Nir Marciano | Nicola Bajetta | Rebecca Sunden | Omri Drori | Kai Golan Hashiloni | Orr Zwebner | Asaf Shina | Orna Almogi | Dorji Wangchuk | Kfir Bar
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Guy Bilitski | Lev Shechter | Sonam Jamtsho | Nir Marciano | Nicola Bajetta | Rebecca Sunden | Omri Drori | Kai Golan Hashiloni | Orr Zwebner | Asaf Shina | Orna Almogi | Dorji Wangchuk | Kfir Bar
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
We introduce a new computational framework for segmenting Classical Tibetan texts into autochthonous and allochthonous regions, distinguishing between indigenous Tibetan compositions and translated materials, primarily from Sanskrit sources. To support this task, we release the first annotated Tibetan corpus for ALLO/AUTO segmentation and evaluate several multilingual encoders, including mBERT and XLM-R, fine-tuned for sequence labeling. Our best model achieves strong alignment with expert annotations, showing that multilingual representations can effectively capture philological boundaries in low-resource settings. This work contributes new resources and methods for computational philology and sheds light on the linguistic markers that trace the intercultural transmission of Buddhist thought in Tibet.