The Making of C optic W ordnet (2019)

Abstract: With the increasing availability of wordnets for ancient languages, such as Ancient Greek and Latin, gaps remain in the coverage of less studied languages of antiquity. This paper reports on the construction and evaluation of a new wordnet for Coptic, the language of Late Roman, Byzantine and Early Islamic Egypt in the first millenium CE. We present our approach to constructing the wordnet which uses multilingual Coptic dictionaries and wordnets for five different languages. We further discuss the results of this effort and outline our on-going/future work.

## introduction this paper reports on the process of constructing a wordnet(wn) for the coptic language. coptic belongs to the egyptian branch of the afroasiatic language family, spoken in egypt mainly in the first millennium ce and written in an extended form of the greek alphabet (see section 1.2). together with its precursor ancient egyptian written in hierolgyphic, hieratic and demotic scripts, coptic forms part of the longest continuously documented language on earth, spanning over four millennia. despite its importance for historical and comparative linguistics, as well as ancient history, coptic remains comparatively low in digital resources when compared to contemporary languages of the ancient and early medieval mediterranean such as latin and ancient greek. with the recent launch of an open source coptic dictionary online @xcite with an interface for human reading, this project aims to follow with the next logical step in machine readable resources for coptic: providing a wordnet for the language, which will also be the first wordnet for the egyptian branch of the afroasiatic languages. wordnet projects aim to provide a machinetractable lexical resource for automated processing of texts. the purpose of a wordnet for the coptic language is in the first instance to support digital scholarship on the language. the coptic language has fewer lexical resources than greek and latin and the manuscripts written in coptic (mainly between the 4th and 12th centuries ce) have received less attention, meaning there is much room for studying their transmission history, an effort that can benefit from a wordnet, for example in recognizing non-verbatim textual reuse. in this paper, we will present our work on constructing the coptic wordnet and outline the goals for this on-going project, as well as an evaluation of its current coverage. ## methods our automated method for building a new wordnet requires two main types of resources: ## discussion and future work the results from the method of constructing the coptic wn are promising. we have introduced the method of sense intersection to construct a wordnet which jumpstarts the process of producing a wordnet that is useful for digital humanities tasks. one of the current limitations relates to the expansion approach that uses only dictionary sources. we plan to create and annotate a sense-tagged corpus, alongside the wordnet, so that we can also gain word frequency information, test for coverage and review concepts in context. we have also argued for the use of union between reviewers as a valid metric since reviewers will not have the same experience with the language. several different reviewers can positively identify attested concepts and this is in no way a reflection that they do not agree. it can indicate, however, that there is debate within the scholarly community. because of this, we would like to invite more coptic scholars into this project, so that the full lexical semantic knowledge can be captured within this resource. we are currently discussing ways to link to the coptic dictionary online (cdo). this would require following practices of linked open data, where the coptic wn can be connected to cdo's entries (e.g. via uris) and, conversely, cdo could be extended to link to related entries from coptic wn. additional on-going work relates to the collaborative interlingual index (cili). within the domain of religious studies, the pwn has shown numerous shortcomings, including badly formed definitions and an inconsistent hierarchical structure @xcite . following this, we believe that the development of the coptic wn can be used to contribute to on-going digital humanities work within the domain of religious studies. this is especially true since much of the content of coptic sources is primarily religious or theological in nature. we also believe that the coptic wn can be a useful resource to further inform mul-tiple coptic (pre-)processing tools, and help in tasks such as part-of-speech tagging and lemmatization. one such example would be the tools available through the coptic scriptorium @xcite which includes multiple coptic processing tools. the coptic wn is relevant to the study of purely linguistic research topics, including but not limited to research in lexical semantics. we would like to extend the work of the etymological wordnet (de melo, 2014) to provide a tool for the study of coptic-related language evolution -including the problems of concept drift @xcite and diachronous meaning shift, concerning how concepts travel through space and time (crossing dialects and even languages), taking slightly different meanings as they move. finally, as it was mentioned above, one of the major motivations behind the construction of the coptic wn was to use its hierarchy for text reuse. in essence, this task is designed to capture short snippets of text similarity (e.g. quoting, summarizing, paraphrasing, translation). tracer is a system capable of using multiple algorithms to find text reuse across large corpora -which is accomplished by word replacement. our wordnet can be used to generate possible word replacements including synonyms, hypernyms, hyponyms, or cohyponyms. we are currently exploring hierarchy traversal and replacement strategies that best produce accurate examples of text reuse.