A New H ebrew U niversal D ependency Treebank: The First Treebank of Post-Rabbinic Historical H ebrew (2025)

Abstract: The corpus of post-Rabbinic historical Hebrew is a foundational corpus of Jewish heritage, containing over a billion words of legal, hermeneutical, and philosophic texts (and more). However, because the linguistic norms of the corpus diverge so often from that of modern Hebrew, the corpus cannot be computationally analyzed with existing Hebrew parsers. In order to fill this lacuna, we present the first Universal Dependencies corpus of post-Rabbinic historical Hebrew. The corpus comprises over 11,800 words, and we are pleased to release it to the community.

## introduction the post-rabbinic historical hebrew corpus is comprised of over a billion words, authored across over a thousand years between the tenth and nineteenth centuries, foot_0 principally in european, asian, and north african lands. it includes, inter alia, works of legal argumentation and responsa, commentaries on scripture and talmud, philosophical treatises, and even works on scientific matters. the language employed in this corpus contains many unique linguistic characteristics which differentiate it from other layers of hebrew, and thus pose a great challenge for computational analysis. heretofore no syntax-annotated corpus has existed for this layer of hebrew, and existing parsers for modern hebrew fall flat when applied to this corpus. in order to fill this lacuna and pave the way for computational analysis of this sizeable corpus which comprises the foundation of jewish culture and law, we have embarked upon a new projectthe first of its kind -to annotate a representative set of post-rabbinic historical hebrew sentences as per the universal dependencies standard. we are pleased to announce the completion of the inaugural batch of this corpus, and to release the corpus to the community. ## existing hebrew corpora the hebrew language is currently represented in four ud corpora. the first of these corpora, ud htb (sade et al., 2018), building on the work of the original htb (winter et al., 2001), provides 6143 sentences (114k tokens) of modern hebrew, taken from the newspaper ha'aretz. this corpus laid the groundwork for application of the ud guidelines to hebrew, with regard to dependency relations and segmentation of space-delimited tokens into syntactic words. zeldes et al. (2022) recognized the need for a more diverse corpus and created a new corpus ("iahltwiki") of 5k sentences (140k tokens) from 39 hebrew wikipedia articles spanning 7 domains. they suggest adjustments to the conventions used in ud htb's conventions for both segmentation and dependency relations. @xcite this was followed by the iahltknesset treebank (2800 sentences, 67k tokens), drawn from protocols held in the israeli parliament between 1998 and 2022, further improving the diversity of the available corpora with the addition of spoken language (goldin et al., 2024). all three of these treebanks cover only the most recent halfcentury of hebrew. swanson and tyers (2022) began to rectify this with a corpus of biblical hebrew, consisting of 2.5k sentences from the books of genesis, exodus, leviticus, and ruth, totaling 62k tokens. the intervening two millennia of hebrew, then, remained unspoken for. ## the present corpus the present corpus comprises over 11,000 words of text from a variety of post-rabbinic hebrew sources. full details of the sources and sentence/word counts are provided in as noted, from a linguistic perspective, the norms of post-rabbinic historical hebrew are quite different from that of modern hebrew; hence the need for a new annotated corpus. in this section we survey three such differences. ## conclusion we have prepared the first ud-tagged corpus of historical post-rabbinic hebrew, containing over 11,000 words across multiple genres and time periods. we are pleased to release this corpus to the public. the corpus is released under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc by 4.0). the corpus is available now on github, @xcite and we hereby submit the corpus to the upcoming ud release as a new treebank within the heb language.