Computational Linguistics and Classical Lexicography

Abstract

Manual lexicography has produced extraordinary results for Greek and Latin, but it cannot in the immediate future provide for all texts the same level of coverage available for the most heavily studied materials. As we build a cyberinfrastructure for Classics in the future, we must explore the role that automatic methods can play within it. Using technologies inherited from the disciplines of computational linguistics and computer science, we can create a complement to these traditional reference works - a dynamic lexicon that presents statistical information about a word’s usage in context, including information about its sense distribution within various authors, genres and eras, and syntactic information as well.