Linking the Neulateinische Wortliste to the LiLa Knowledge Base of Interoperable Resources for L atin (2023)

Abstract: This paper describes the process of interlinking a lexical resource consisting of a list of more than 20,000 Neo-Latin words with other resources for Latin. The resources are made interoperable thanks to their linking to the anonymous Knowledge Base, which applies Linguistic Linked Open Data practices and data categories to describe and publish on the Web both textual and lexical resources for the Latin language.

## introduction the latin language shows a diachronic span covering more than two millennia, from the first literary texts in the 3rd century bc until today, when, for instance, latin is the official language of the vatican state. moreover, having been for centuries the lingua franca of what is now referred to as the european area, latin has been used in several different places by people with different cultural backgrounds, who produced texts of different typologies, thus resulting in a substantial degree of diatopic, diastratic and diaphasic variation. such a variation concerns every level of metalinguistic analysis, including morphology (korkiakangas and passarotti, 2011), syntax (ponti and passarotti, 2016), semantics (perrone et al., 2021) and the lexicon. as for the latter, despite the closed-corpus status of the latin language (with a few exceptions of newly coined terms), there is not one fully comprehensive lexical resource that features the entire latin lexicon. yet, throughout the centuries, the lexicographic work on latin has produced several dictionaries, lexica and glossaries covering specific eras (and/or areas) of the latin language. for instance, the latin-english dictionary by lewis & short (lewis and short, 1879) includes lexical entries about words from the classical era, while the glossary by du cange (du cange et al., 1883-1887) and the frankfurt latin lexicon (mehler et al., 2020) concern medieval latin. over the last two decades, the research area dealing with linguistic resources for latin has grown substantially, leading to the current availability of a large number of (annotated) corpora, including five treebanks available in the universal dependencies collection (de marneffe et al., 2021) and several retro-digitised and newly built lexical resources. such a situation raised the issue of the interoperability between the resources for latin (like for many other languages), which are stored in separate silos and cannot interact. starting in 2018, the lila: linking latin project foot_0 addressed this issue, by building a linked data knowledge base of interoperable resources for latin. in the lila knowledge base, interoperability between resources is achieved by linking all those entries in lexical resources and tokens in corpora that point to the same lemma. as a consequence, the core of the lila knowledge base consists of a large collection of latin lemmas (called lemma bank), published as linked data and following the vocabulary and categories of the ontolex-lemon model (mccrae et al., 2017; passarotti et al., 2020). given the central role played by the lemma bank in the architecture of lila, its lexical coverage is of the utmost importance. @xcite in order to enhance the lemma bank with lemmas belonging to the so-called neo-latin or modern latin variety, we have recently started the process of linking the lexical entries of the neulateinische wortliste (nlw) by j. ramminger, a dictionary of latin from petrarch up to the 18th century (ramminger, 2016). @xcite the dictionary currently includes about 21k entries, promising to allow for a relevant widening of the lexical coverage of the lemma bank. this paper describes the stages of this ongoing linking process, detailing the ones that we have already accomplished and outlining the future work. ## data the nlw is a lexical resource that collects entries from the so-called neo-latin lexicon. these were retrieved mainly from literary sources and partly from secondary literature, such as scientific publications on neo-latin (schoeck et al., 1990). the diachronic range covered by the resource spans between 1300 and 1700, on the basis of a decision taken by field experts, as explained by the author in the documentation available on the website. @xcite in the nlw, neo-latin is considered as the diachronic development of a specific diastratic variety of the language, namely latin written production influenced by the linguistic ideals of renaissance humanists. these ideals may be subsumed under two general purposes: recovery of the language of classical antiquity, and enriching the lexicon with new entries that mirror contemporary changes in the society, e.g. typographus 'typographer'. however, the nlw does not feature the entire neo-latin lexicon according to these criteria, but it reflects its author's interests, as stated in the documentation. the word list, consisting of 21,352 entries, was provided by the author in .docx format. the content of each entry is organised into a set of fields. the first one contains the citation form(s) of the lemma and all its graphical variants, followed by morphological information about its inflectional category, e.g. the endings of other forms of the word and a shortcut for the gender: for instance, "-a, -um" (the feminine and neuter of the nominative singular) for first class adjectives like bizarrus 'moody'; "-i, m." (the genitive singular and the gender) for second declension masculine nouns like almirarchus 'admiral'; "-ire, -ivi, -itum" (the present active infinitive, first-person singular of the perfect and supine) for fourth conjugation regular verbs like semiambio 'to half-circle'. the other fields feature a translation into german of the lemma and examples of its usage in textual sources, a set of administrative metadata (i.e. date of the creation), a numeric unique identifier for the entry, and philo- ## the neulateinische wortliste in lila the lila knowledge base follows the principles of the linguistic linked open data paradigm. it adopts the rdf data model (lassila and swick, 1998), where information is coded in terms of triples that connect a subject to an object through a property. each instance of an item ("individual") belongs to a specific class. the structure of the data is expressed by means of subclass relations and/or restrictions on the domain and range of properties -i.e., on the kinds of elements that they can have as subject and object, respectively. classes and properties of existing ontologies are reused when possible, new ones are introduced if necessary. as was hinted above, the core class of the lila knowledge base is lila:lemma. @xcite the lemmas of the lemma bank, to which the entries of lexical resources and the tokens of textual resources are linked, belong to this class. the lemma is simply defined as the citation form of a word, as it is recorded in dictionaries. therefore, it is treated as a subclass of the class of forms in the ontolex vocabulary (ontolex:form). @xcite this is the vocabulary that is used for the inclusion of lexical resources into the lila knowledge base: their entries belong to the class ontolex:lexicalentry, foot_8 and they are connected to the corresponding lila:lemma in the lemma bank by means of the property ontolex:canonicalform; foot_9 entries of different resources that refer to the same word are linked to the same lemma in the lemma bank, thus achieving the desired interoperability. as a consequence, the very first step of our procedure consisted in going through the entries of the nlw and looking for the corresponding lemma(s) in the lemma bank. this was done by matching the string of the entry as it appears in the first field of the data that were delivered to us (see section 2) with the different graphical variants of the lemmas in the lemma bank -coded as different writtenrepresentations using the ontolex vocabulary. @xcite this allowed us to unambiguously link 5,651 entries to their corresponding lemmas. in other cases (716 entries), however, more than one lemma matched the string of the nlw entry, so a disambiguation is needed to select which lemma is the correct one. lastly, there are 14,985 entries of the nlw that are not found in the lemma bank: in these cases, we need to add a new lemma to be able to link those entries. figure 1 shows this distribution visually. in what follows, we describe our procedure i) to automatically generate new lemmas with all the relevant information (section 3.1), and ii) to disambiguate between different homographic lemmas that match the string of a single nlw citation form (section 3.2). ## conclusion and future work in this paper, we have described the ongoing process of linking a dictionary of neo-latin to the lila knowledge base. based on the lexical entries of the dictionary, the collection of lemmas that represents the core component of lila was enhanced with more than 13,000 new items. @xcite such an extension of the lila lemma bank promises to improve its lexical coverage of the neo-latin texts that we plan to link to the knowledge base in the near future. in particular, the texts will be taken from the camena corpus, that counts about 50 million tokens. @xcite besides the citation form (the lemma) and the translation(s) in german of the words (modelled as individuals belonging to the class than one citation form, as these cannot always be treated automatically (see also the discussion in section 4). furthermore, we have seen in section 3.1 that the nlw provides a morphological classification of lemmas that is sometimes more fine-grained than the one adopted in the lemma bank, and was thus not exploited in our procedure to automatically generate new lemmas. however, this is a potentially useful piece of information, that we plan to model in linked data, using the morphology module (morph) of ontolex-lemon (chiarcos et al., 2022b). lastly, we have seen in sections 3.1 and 3.2 that those entries of the nlw that have more than one citation form were left out from our automatic procedure. this is motivated by the fact that the nature of the different citation forms and the relation between them can be diverse, and consequently require a different modelling. in some cases (e.g., typographicus/typograficus 'typographic'), they are simply graphical variants, that should be treated as written representations of the same lemma. in other cases, they would be considered as different lemmas, connected to each other through the property lila:lemmavariant, foot_17 according to the current practice of the lila knowledge base -e.g., because they have different genders, as in cibulus(m)/cibulum(n) 'morsel'. since an ontolex:lexicalentry cannot have more than one ontolex:canonicalform relation, such cases require the introduction of different (sub-)entries, whose organisation can be modelled using classes and properties of the lexicography module (lexicog) @xcite of ontolex-lemon. after converting the nlw into a rdf serialisation (turtle), we published the resource as linked data in the lila knowledge base, so to make it interoperable with the other lexical and textual resources for latin already included therein. @xcite