Avi Shmidman ; Moshe Koppel ; Ely Porat - Identification of Parallel Passages Across a Large Hebrew/Aramaic Corpus

jdmdh:1388 - Journal of Data Mining & Digital Humanities, March 11, 2018, Special Issue on Computer-Aided Processing of Intertextuality in Ancient Languages - https://doi.org/10.46298/jdmdh.1388
Identification of Parallel Passages Across a Large Hebrew/Aramaic CorpusArticle

Authors: Avi Shmidman ; Moshe Koppel ; Ely Porat

    We propose a method for efficiently finding all parallel passages in a large corpus, even if the passages are not quite identical due to rephrasing and orthographic variation. The key ideas are the representation of each word in the corpus by its two most infrequent letters, finding matched pairs of strings of four or five words that differ by at most one word and then identifying clusters of such matched pairs. Using this method, over 4600 parallel pairs of passages were identified in the Babylonian Talmud, a Hebrew-Aramaic corpus of over 1.8 million words, in just over 30 seconds. Empirical comparisons on sample data indicate that the coverage obtained by our method is essentially the same as that obtained using slow exhaustive methods.


    Volume: Special Issue on Computer-Aided Processing of Intertextuality in Ancient Languages
    Section: Towards a Digital Ecosystem: NLP. Corpus infrastructure. Methods for Retrieving Texts and Computing Text Similarities
    Published on: March 11, 2018
    Accepted on: March 10, 2018
    Submitted on: March 1, 2016
    Keywords: Computer Science - Computation and Language

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