A Layered Annotation Workflow for Semitic Epigraphy

What it is about

The authors describe a web annotation platform for Phoenician inscriptions, built on a curated subset of KAI, with a React front end and a Firestore back end. Each inscription is stored as lines, tokens, and separate linguistic layers (graphemic, morphosyntactic, semantic and pragmatic, contextual), linked by token identifiers. The layers can be queried and revised independently, and variant readings and degrees of certainty are kept rather than flattened. Editing follows a staged workflow: an editor annotates, a peer reviews and flags uncertainty, and a chief editor approves, with every step logged. A case study retrieves dedication clauses (a verb of making or dedicating, an agent, an object, and a recipient deity with a prepositional marker) as morphosyntactic templates across inscriptions. The corpus is small (about twenty inscriptions), and the full data were not yet public at submission.

Ideas

• I1. Keep variant readings as data. In the unpointed mode of tools/hbo, a token can carry several candidate pointings with weights and a source for each; a later rule states which reading wins and why, and the alternatives stay in the output.
• I2. Keep the layers separate, keyed by token id: a morphology rule can be re-run without touching the text, the same split that macula dict already makes between lexicon and treebank.
• I3. A template query on the Hebrew Bible: a formulaic clause (verb, agent, object, recipient) as a feature pattern over the trees, counted across books, to find blessing and curse formulas. This is a test for the rules, not a new model.

For Mova

I1 and I2 are design notes for tools/hbo, where the segmenter and parser output should keep alternatives. I3 is a test that can be written in prag or world and placed in Syntax: the clause and the sentence. The data model is what matters here: the paper gives no measurement that Mova could reuse. Because of the NC licence, the card records a summary only.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.63317/5h3xy7mbk7rj

@inproceedings{bernstein2026layered,
  title = {{A Layered Annotation Workflow for Semitic Epigraphy}},
  author = {Bernstein, Tal and Gordin, Shai and Cerqueglini, Letizia},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Language Technologies for Historical and Ancient Languages (LT4HALA 2026) @ LREC 2026},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.63317/5h3xy7mbk7rj},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/5h3xy7mbk7rj}
}

References

25 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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