DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.13364554
title: Benchmark for the Evaluation of Lexical Semantic Change Detection for Ancient Greek

description: This repository contains a benchmark of Ancient Greek lemmas which underwent semantic change. It is meant as a support for the evaluation of methods detecting lexical semantic change in Ancient Greek. It was created at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. A publication will follow soon.

 

1. Overview of the repository

This benchmark was created by retrieving and selecting from existing scholarship cases of lexemes which underwent semantic change. The evaluation items are 44 Ancient Greek lemmas, accompanied by the following information (see the column headers in the CSV file):



reference: the literature source of information about the change;

which_change: an explanation of the change in meaning. NB: the older meaning(s) do not necessarily disappear after the change, but it can happen that the new meaning(s) are added to the existing one(s), increasing the polysemy of the lemma;

when_changed: information about the work(s) or time period in which the change was first recorded; this kind of information was not always available or precise;

christian_change: whether the change is triggered by social, religious, or cultural changes related to the spread of Christianity, according to the scholarship.


 

2. References

The literature used to build this benchmark is the following:

    BUCK, Carl Darling. A dictionary of selected synonyms in the principal Indo-European languages. University of Chicago Press, 1949.

    FINKELBERG, Aryeh. "On the History of the Greek ΚΟΣΜΟΣ." Harvard Studies in Classical Philology (1998): 103-136.

    GINGRICH, F. Wilbur. "The Greek New Testament as a landmark in the course of semantic change." Journal of Biblical Literature (1954): 189-196.

    HORKY, Phillip Sidney. "When did Kosmos become the Kosmos." Cosmos in the Ancient World (2019): 22-41.

    LURAGHI, Silvia. "The verb aréskein in Ancient Greek: Constructions and semantic change." Acta Linguistica Petropolitana. Труды института лингвистических исследований 18-1 (2022): 226-245.

 

These dictionaries of Ancient Greek were also used to double-check the instances of change:

    LIDDELL, Henry George, and Robert Scott. A Greek-English Lexicon. revised and augmented throughout by. Sir Henry Stuart Jones. with the assistance of. Roderick McKenzie. Oxford. Clarendon Press. 1940.

    ROCCI, Lorenzo. Vocabolario greco-italiano. Roma. Società editrice Dante Alighieri. 1939.

    SLUITER, Ineke, and Lucien van Beek, and Ton Kessels, and Albert Rijksbaron. Woordenboek Grieks/Nederlands. 2024. https://woordenboekgrieks.nl/

 

3. Acknowledgements

This work was partially supported by the Young Academy Groningen through the PhD scholarship of Silvia Stopponi. We acknowledge the financial support of Anchoring Innovation. Anchoring Innovation is the Gravitation Grant research agenda of the Dutch National Research School in Classical Studies, OIKOS. It is financially supported by the Dutch ministry of Education, Culture and Science (NWO project number 024.003.012). For more information about the research programme and its results, see the website www.anchoringinnovation.nl.



 

4. How to cite


Until there is no publication about this benchmark, please cite the resource as:

Silvia Stopponi, Saskia Peels-Matthey, Malvina Nissim (2024), Benchmark for the Evaluation of Lexical Semantic Change Detection Measures in Ancient Greek, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.13364555.