Text-Fabric: handling Biblical data with IKEA logistics

What it is about

Text-Fabric is the data model and Python package in which the ETCBC's annotated Hebrew Bible (BHSA) is distributed. The model is minimal: words are numbered slots (426 584 in the BHSA); every larger object (phrase, clause, sentence, book, lexeme) is a node defined by its set of slots (about a million more); edges link nodes; every annotation is a feature, one file per feature, mapping nodes or edges to values. Because each feature is a separate file, different teams can add layers (syntax, another morphology, prosody) without touching each other, and a user weaves only the ones needed. Two worked jobs: printing BHSA trees with any word representation chosen at run time, and aligning the Open Scriptures morphology (OSHB, on the WLC, morpheme-split) to the BHSA's words. That comparison showed about 30 000 part-of-speech disagreements, 29 000 of them systematic and absorbed by lexeme-based exception rules, leaving about 1 000 to inspect; e.g. OSHB "verb" maps to BHSA verb in 84%, quotation verb 10%, copula 5%.

Ideas

I1. Keep Mova's hbo layers as separate per-token columns keyed by sent_id + token index (trees, prag, dictionary links, accents, later prosody), so a new layer never requires regenerating the others; check that the parse database already does this and say so in chapter 13.
I2. Compare two annotations systematically, then explain the bulk by lexeme-level rules and inspect only the residue: apply to MACULA vs PTNK UPOS/relations (macula compare), reporting the confusion table and the share absorbed by per-lemma rules.
I3. The BHSA's "quotation verb" and "copulative verb" subclasses are a ready inventory for Mova's speech-frame verbs (אמר, דבר, קרא …) and for היה as copula; check our SAYING list in prag.rs against it. BHSA itself is CC BY-NC: use it as a measure only.

For Mova

I1 is a design note for 13. Biblical Hebrew in Mova: the tools (FEATS/MISC, the parse database). I2 extends macula compare (chapter 13 §7). I3 is a check on tools/macula/src/prag.rs (the frame verbs) and on the copula paragraph of 08-syntax.md.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.7146/hn.v5i2.142740

@inproceedings{roorda2019text,
  title = {{Text-Fabric: handling Biblical data with IKEA logistics}},
  author = {Roorda, Dirk},
  booktitle = {HIPHIL Novum 5},
  year = {2019},
  doi = {10.7146/hn.v5i2.142740},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.7146/hn.v5i2.142740}
}

References

7 references, 1 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

Doedens, Crist-Jan (1994), Text Databases. One Database Model and Several Retrieval Languages, number 14 in Language and Computers, Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam, Netherlands and Atlanta, USA. ISBN: 90-5183-729-1, http://books.google.nl/books?id=9ggOBRz1dO4C . ↗
Elliger, Karl and Wilhelm Rudolf Rudolph, editors (1997), Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, 5th corrected ed., Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, Stuttgart, Germany. http://www.bibelwissenschaft.de/startseite/wis-senschaftliche-bibelausgaben/biblia-hebraica/bhs/ ↗
Petersen, Ulrik (2004), Emdros - a text database engine for analyzed or annotated text, Proceedings of COL-ING 2004, p. 1190–1193. http://emdros.org/petersen-emdros-COLING-2004.pdf . ↗
Peursen, Wido Th. and Dirk Roorda (2015), Hebrew text database ETCBC4b. Dataset available online at Data Archiving and Networked services, Den Haag, Netherlands. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17026/dans-z6y-skyh ↗
Roorda, Dirk, Jan Krans, Bert-Jan Lietaert-Peerbolte, Wido Th. van Peursen, Ulrik Sandborg- Petersen, and Eep Talstra (2012), Scientific report of the workshop biblical scholarship and humanities computing: Data types, text, language and interpretation, held at the Lorentz Centre Leiden from 6 feb 2012 through 10 feb 2012, Technical report, Lorentz Center, Leiden. http://www.lorentzcen-ter.nl/lc/web/2012/480/report.php3?wsid=480&venue=Oort ↗
Roorda, D. 2017. The Hebrew Bible as Data: Laboratory - Sharing - Experiences. In: Odijk J. & van Hessen A, CLARIN in the Low Countries. London: Ubiquity Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/bbi.18 ↗ our card
Dirk Roorda, & Cody Kingham. (2017, October 31). ETCBC/bhsa: Many fixes. (Version v1.1.0). Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1039470 ↗

This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/hbo-2019-roorda-text-fabric-handling-biblical-data/