Gregory Crane
February 26, 2025
On behalf of myself and my co-authors, Alison Babeu and Farnoosh Shamsian, I am pleased to announce that our article on “Greek, Latin and Augmented Intelligence: the other AI” has appeared online as part of the Classical Review. The DOI is https://doi.org/10.1017/S0009840X25000356. The online publication occurred today. The article has not yet been assigned a volume number but it is available as part of the Cambridge Core.
The article is, unfortunately, not available under an open access license. We felt that, by publishing in a well-established journal, we would reach a different audience. By publishing in a traditional journal such as Classical Review, we also place this paper in a space that has its own mechanisms for long term preservation. The description of treebanks and aligned translations as they appear in the early 2020s may be of interest to future readers as they reflect on the technological evolution of scholarship.
The opening and concluding paragraphs from the piece, quoted below, serve as an abstract.
“This Profile looks at two technologies that were developed to make source texts in the original Greek, Latin and, indeed, any language directly accessible to audiences who have not yet studied – and may never study – the language itself: (1) translations aligned at the word and phrase level with the original text and (2) rich linguistic annotations explaining the part of speech, regularised dictionary form and syntactic function of each word in a corpus (typically called treebanks, because the syntactic structure is commonly visualised as an inverted tree).”
CONCLUSION – TOWARDS THE OTHER AI, AUGMENTED INTELLIGENCE
An enormous amount of work remains to be done improving our ability to generate alignments and treebanks automatically, refining the results of automatic methods for manageable amounts, and on using new refined data to generate better models for automatic analysis. Nevertheless, we finally have in place the basic services that enable new forms of reading and make source texts in the original language intellectually accessible to new audiences. This addresses a critical challenge for linguistically constrained subjects such as ancient Greek and Roman culture where only a relative handful will develop mastery of ancient Greek or Latin, much less mastery of the research publications in languages such as French, German, Italian and Spanish (to mention only traditional European languages of publication). But if we have the basic tools, we are only now starting to understand how these tools are used and how users do and do not benefit. The most important research area for students of the past might not be how to produce new articles and monographs but to learn how we can exploit digital methods to make the results of our work advance the intellectual life of society as a whole.