The GLAU x corpus: methodological issues in designing a long-term, diverse, multi-layered corpus of A ncient G reek (2021)

Abstract: This paper describes the GLAUx project (“the Greek Language Automated”), an ongoing effort to develop a large long-term diachronic corpus of Greek, covering sixteen centuries of literary and non-literary material annotated with NLP methods. After providing an overview of related corpus projects and discussing the general architecture of the corpus, it zooms in on a number of larger methodological issues in the design of historical corpora. These include the encoding of textual variants, handling extralinguistic variation and annotating linguistic ambiguity. Finally, the long- and short-term perspectives of this project are discussed.

## introduction the increasing availability of large-scale corpus resources has had a lasting impact on the field of linguistics. in the field of corpus linguistics, large quantities of data have made it possible to precisely model complex multifactorial processes of linguistic change (e.g. @xcite . modern methods in natural language processing also increasingly make use of word embeddings, which encode rich information about the use of a word learned from large datasets @xcite ; see @xcite for diachronic word embeddings). from a diachronic perspective, the greek language corpus is an ideal candidate for a largescale corpus-linguistic approach: it is not only one of the longest preserved languages (with a large body of text already in the 8th century bc, and continuing up until the present day), but it also is extremely well-documented: the thesaurus linguae graecae library of ancient greek literary texts, for example, contains more than 110 million words @xcite . to make such an approach possible, this paper will describe glaux ("the greek language automated"), a project aiming to collect a large corpus (spanning sixteen centuries) of ancient greek texts from various sources and to automatically annotate this corpus for rich linguistic information. the construction of such a long-term historical corpus is obviously not a trivial task. the goal of this paper is therefore to describe the central problems encountered during this endeavor and the approaches currently adopted to tackle these problems. this will be discussed in section 3, after giving an overview of the data and annotation layers in section 2. finally, section 4 will give an outlook of future work for this (long-term) project. ## conclusion and outlook this paper has described glaux, an ongoing project aiming to compile a large and diverse corpus of historical greek. a test version of this corpus has already been released on github: foot_5 we aim to release a first version including all the papyrus data and the literary data until the fourth century ad in the course of 2021. i identified some important issues in constructing this corpus, and suggested a number of possible solutions: these include the encoding of textual variants, dealing with a high degree of extralinguistic variation and annotating 'ambiguous' constructions. these issues should be highly relevant for other researchers working with historical corpora, and i hope that this discussion may inspire further research. the annotation of this corpus will be continuously improved in the coming years, as it is put to work in several research projects at the ku leuven. it plays a key role in the pedagogical pedalion project foot_6 and in a recently approved valency and prosodical information, as discussed by mcgillivray and vatri) are provided. @xcite . in this project we will examine how the glaux corpus can be applied to the study of language-related ideas expressed in ancient greek. the underlying hypothesis is that applying well-informed corpusbased methods, going beyond the level of the individual word or term, enables us to study (intellectual and conceptual) history from a wider perspective. it goes without saying that the applications for other domains and projects are manifold.