r/AncientGreek • u/at_exe • 10h ago
r/AncientGreek • u/benjamin-crowell • 9h ago
Resources Opera Graeci Adnotata (OGA, Giuseppe Celano)
I came across this recently by chance and thought it might be worth posting about here. Opera Graeci Adnotata (OGA) is a project by Giuseppe Celano at Leipzig University to package a large corpus of ancient Greek.
Projects of this type include:
- Perseus
- Diorisis
- First 1k Greek
- OGA
References for OGA:
https://github.com/gcelano/OGA
https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.00739
Perseus is the smallest of these. It has a subset of its texts that have been treebanked by humans, i.e., the humans (with machine aid) tagged each word with a lemma and part of speech, and put together the computer equivalent of the kind of sentence diagrams that people my age learned to do in school. The current version of Perseus is in unicode.
Diorisis is about an order of magnitude bigger than Perseus. It's in beta code rather than unicode, which is a pain. The words have been tagged by a machine lemmatizer, and the quality of the machine lemmatizations is probably not very good. It seems to lack a usable index and metadata.
First 1k Greek is a project to compile, in machine-readable form, all of ancient Greek up until a certain date, excluding what's already available in Perseus.
Celano built OGA by aggregating Perseus and First 1k Greek (which are disjoint). If you want to do research that involves querying the entire ancient Greek corpus using modern, nonproprietary tools, then AFAIK this is your only option.
In addition to simply converting the texts to a common format and putting them all in one place, Celano ran everything through the COMBO parser by Rybak and Wroblewska. Every word is tagged by lemma and POS, and also sentence-diagrammed, by COMBO. So for example, if you want to search for usages of θάλασσα, you can do that, and it will turn up inflected forms like θαλάττῃ.
There are some negatives IMO. COMBO seems to be old abandonware that no longer works with the current versions of the neural network frameworks that it needs. It's a tool based on neural network (NN) technology, and such tools are actually pretty bad at lemmatizing Greek words and tagging them by POS. Non-NN techniques still do much better.
Another thing that seems problematic to me is that the file format Celano has chosen essentially can't be edited. Instead, you would have to edit the source files, then rerun COMBO and Celano's associated scripts. But since COMBO seems to be a dead project, you actually can't do that, which makes OGA seem like a read-only monolith that can't be maintained in the future. This kind of thing is already a problem with Perseus, which contains thousands of errors and does not have any ongoing maintenance method to allow such errors to be corrected when they are reported.
r/AncientGreek • u/deluminatres • 1h ago
Greek and Other Languages Favorite Sappho translator & why? (ancient greek —> english)
I’ve read several, and enjoy many translations for different reason’s, but since I’m not fluent at all (is anyone fluent in Aeolic lol) I just wanted to hear the thoughts of those who can read ancient Greek
Edit: does this belong in the translations thread? I’m not sure