Constructing an Annotated Resource for Part-Of-Speech Tagging of Mishnaic Hebrew
Authors: Emiliano Giovannetti, Davide Albanesi, Andrea Bellandi, Simone Marchi, Alessandra Pecchioli (CNR-ILC, Progetto Traduzione Talmud Babilonese S.c.a r.l., 2018)
Topic: Lexical and Semantic Resources and Analysis

Abstract
This paper introduces the research in Part-Of-Speech tagging of mishnaic Hebrew carried out within the Babylonian Talmud Translation Project. Since no tagged resource was available to train a stochastic POS tagger, a portion of the Mishna of the Babylonian Talmud has been morphologically annotated using an ad hoc developed tool connected with the DB containing the talmudic text being translated. The final aim of this research is to add a linguistic support to the Translation Memory System of Traduco, the Computer-Assisted Translation tool developed and used within the Project.

Introduction
The present work has been conducted within the Babylonian Talmud Translation Project (in Italian, Progetto Traduzione Talmud Babilonese PTTB) which aims at the translation of the Babylonian Talmud (BT) into Italian. The translation is being carried out with the aid of tools for text and language processing integrated into an application, called Traduco (Bellandi et al., 2016), developed by the Institute of Computational Linguistics “Antonio Zampolli” of the CNR in collaboration with the PTTB team. Traduco is a collaborative computer-assisted translation (CAT) tool conceived to ease the translation, revision and editing of the BT. The research described here fits exactly in this context: we want to provide the system with additional informative elements as a further aid in the translation of the Talmud. In particular, we intend to linguistically analyze the Talmudic text starting from the automatic attribution of the Part-Of-Speech to words by adopting a stochastic POS tagging approach. The first difficulty that has emerged regards the text and the languages it contains. In this regard we can say, simplifying, that the Babylonian Talmud is essentially composed of two languages which, in turn, correspond to two distinct texts: the Mishna and the Gemara. The first is the oldest one written in mishnaic Hebrew, one of the most homogeneous and coherent languages appearing in the Talmud that, for this reason, has been chosen to start from in the POS tagging experiment. The main purpose of linguistic analysis in the context of our translation project is to improve the suggestions provided by the system through the so-called Translation Memory (TM). Moreover, on a linguistically annotated text it is possible to carry out linguistic-based searches, useful both for the scholar (in this case a talmudist), and, during the translation work, for the revisor and the curator, who have the possibility, for example, to make bulk editing of polysemous words by discarding out words with undesired POS. The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 summarizes the state of the art in NLP of Hebrew. The construction of the linguistically annotated corpus is described in Section 3. The training process and evaluation of the POS taggers used in the experiments is detailed in Section 4. Lastly, Section 5 outlines the next steps of the research.

Conclusion
In this work, the tagging experiments have been limited to the attribution of the PartOf-Speech: the next, natural step, will be the addition of the lemma. Furthermore, we will try to modify the parameters affecting the behaviour of the three adopted POS taggers (left at their default values for the experiments) and see how they influence the results. Once the Mishna will be lemmatized, Traduco, the software used to translate the Talmud in Italian, will be able to exploit this additional information mainly to provide translators with translation suggestions based on lemmas, but also to allow users to query the mishnaic text by POS and lemma. As a further step we will also take into account the linguistic annotation of portions of the Babylonian Talmud written in other languages, starting from the Babylonian Aramaic, the language of the Gemara, which constitutes the earlier portion of the Talmud. Acknowledgments This work was conducted in the context of the TALMUD project and the scientific cooperation between S.c.a r.l. PTTB and ILC-CNR.