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SunoikisisDC Summer 2021 Session 9

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Gabriel Bodard edited this page Jun 10, 2021 · 15 revisions

Sunoikisis Digital Classics, Summer 2021

Session 9. Named Entity Recognition and Prosopography

Thursday June 10, 17:15-18:45 CEST

Convenors: Monica Berti (University of Leipzig) and Gabriel Bodard (ICS London)

YouTube link: https://youtu.be/VYSVaK_cLWs

Combined slides (PDF)

Session outline

In this session we will present the history of collecting names and lives of ancient persons (onomastics and prosopography), including historical and in databases or other digital forms, including discussion of the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names, the SNAP:DRGN Project, and linking information between person-databases. We will then look at the concept of Named Entity Recognition (NER), and how this methodology can be used to create annotations of canonical individuals, including authors and subjects of ancient works, for digital research.

Seminar readings

Further readings

  • S. Bird, E. Klein, E. Loper. Natural Language Processing with Python. Analyzing Text with the Natural Language Toolkit. O'Reilly 2009. Available https://www.nltk.org/book/ and http://www.nltk.org/book_1ed/
  • G. Bodard. 2021. “Linked Open Data for Ancient Names and People,” in Linked Open Data for the Ancient Mediterranean: Structures, Practices, Prospects (edd. Bond, Dilley, Horne). ISAW Papers 20 (2021). Available: http://dlib.nyu.edu/awdl/isaw/isaw-papers/20-4/
  • G. Bodard, Hugh Cayless, Mark Depauw, Leif Isaksen, K. Faith Lawrence, Sebastian Rahtz†. 2017. “Standards for Networking Ancient Person-data: Digital approaches to problems in prosopographical space.” Digital Classics Online 3.2 (2017). Available: http://dx.doi.org/10.11588/dco.2017.0.37975
  • Jing Li, Aixin Sun, Jianglei Han, Chenliang Li. “A Survey on Deep Learning for Named Entity Recognition.” arXiv:1812.09449
  • E. Matthews & S. Rahtz. 2013. “The Lexicon of Greek Personal Names and classical web services.” In The Digital Classicist 2013, es. S. Dunn & S. Mahony, Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies Supplement 122. Pp. 107–124. Available: https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:7fb942c1-ffd7-415f-942c-6d5a75808434.
  • D. Nouvel, M. Ehrmann, S. Rosset. Named Entities for Computational Linguistics. Wiley 2016. DOI: 10.1002/9781119268567
  • Verboven, K., Carlier, M. & Dumolyn, J. 2007. “A Short Manual to the Art of Prosopography.” In Keats-Rohan (ed.) Prosopography Approaches and Applications: A Handbook. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pp. 35–69. Available: https://prosopography.history.ox.ac.uk/images/01%20Verboven%20pdf.pdf

Reference materials

Exercise

Option 1

Search lemmata and inflected forms of ancient Greek NEs in the Named Entities Digger and in the Named Entities Concordance of the Digital Athenaeus project. Explore how they are annotated and the kind of data displayed in the output.

Option 2

  1. Look at the instructions and example query given on this SNAP:DRGN page. Try not to be scared by the complex query language, all you need to do is add identifiers and copy and paste the rest!
  2. Go to the SNAP Sparql query page, and copy the sample piece of code from the page about into the query box, just to check that it works.
  3. The search results will be in the form of a snippet of RDF downloaded onto your computer; you will need to open this in a text editor and copy the URL from there into your browser to see the page.
  4. Visit at least one (ideally all three) of LGPN, Trismegistos and PIR and search or browse for a person on each.
  5. Using the instructions to construct a SNAP identifier for your person, try to find them in the SNAP query form. Pay careful attention to spaces, upper- and lower-case, and other things that might break the code!
  6. As above, copy the URL from the text file on your desktop, and look at the web page it returns. Does the SNAP page contain more or less information than you expected. Can you speculate as to why?
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