Interfacing the Hebrew Bible: past, present and future applications for the BHSA

What it is about

A personal history and wish list for interfaces to the ETCBC's annotated Hebrew Bible (BHSA). The past case is the Role Lexical Module (2004–2009), which mapped BHSA morphosyntax to Role and Reference Grammar semantics: a parser with about 50 rewrite rules covered most basic clauses, verbs' logical structures were stored in a lexicon, and an automatic transliteration helped learners read. The present case is Bible Online Learner (since 2009), which drills learners on real corpus forms rather than textbook paradigms, generates exercises on the fly from database features, and tracks performance (correct answers per minute). For the future the author asks for a successor to the RRG tool, multilingual glosses, links from words to images and grammar, a frequency slider that hides or shows glosses by word frequency, spaced repetition, tolerant answer checking with synonyms from translations, and a way to record disagreements with the database's choices without losing the shared reference.

Ideas

• I1. A frequency-band reading view for the Torah course: hide or show the gloss of each word by its lemma frequency rank (e.g. show only words below the top 300), generated from the dictionary's counts.
• I2. Exercises drawn from real forms by frequency: pick the most frequent inflected forms of each binyan and tense from the trees for verb drills, rather than full paradigms.
• I3. Store Mova's disagreements with MACULA as an overlay file (token id, field, MACULA value, our value, reason), never by editing the source, so both readings stay citable; this is how chapter 13's "known defects of the data" could be kept machine-readable.
• I4. The claim that ~50 rules cover most basic clauses is a target to measure: the share of Torah clauses our head rules convert without a fallback.

For Mova

I1 and I2 are for the Torah course and the parse database (13. Biblical Hebrew in Mova: the tools §10), using macula dict frequencies (10-lexicon.md). I3 is a format for tools/macula and §13 of chapter 13. I4 is a count in macula reported in chapter 13 §6.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.7146/hn.v5i2.142742

@inproceedings{winthernielsen2019interfacing,
  title = {{Interfacing the Hebrew Bible: past, present and future applications for the BHSA}},
  author = {Winther-Nielsen, Nicolai},
  booktitle = {HIPHIL Novum 5},
  year = {2019},
  doi = {10.7146/hn.v5i2.142742},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.7146/hn.v5i2.142742}
}

References

20 references, 4 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

1. Behringer, R., Gram-Hansen, S.B., Soosay, M., Mikulecká, J., Smith, C., Winther-Nielsen, N., and Herber, E. 2013. Persuasive Technology for Learning in Business Context. International Journal of Information Systems and Engineering (IJISE), ISSN 2289 – 3709, vol 1., no.1. find
2. Kuala Lumpur, April 2013. Also presented at ASCENT Conference, 11.-12.April 2013, Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia). find
3. Benner, Drayton C and Covington, James R. 2016. A New Transliteration of the Hebrew Bible”. SBL presenta-taion in San Antonio November 20, 2016. [https://www.slideshare.net/jrcovington/a-new-translitera-tion-of-the-hebrew-bible ↗
4. Berman, Joshua A. 2017. Inconsistencies in the Torah: Ancient Literary Convention and the Limits of Source Criticism. Oxford: OUP. find
5. Bullard, Jeremy. 2019. The 100 “Simplest” Chapters of the Hebrew Bible. Hebrew Higher Learning, 21, 1-6. find
6. Gottschalk, Judith and Winther-Nielsen, Nicolai. 2013. Persuasive skill development: On computational surveillance strategies for modeling learning statistics with PLOTLearner. I: Behringer and Sinclair, s. 109-116. find
7. Roorda, Dirk. 2017. The Hebrew Bible as Data: Laboratory - Sharing – Experiences. In Odijk, J. and van Hessen, A. (eds.) CLARIN in the Low Countries. London: Ubiquity Press [DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/bbi. License: CC-BY 4.0] ↗ our card
8. Winther-Nielsen, Nicolai. 1995. A Functional Discourse Grammar of Joshua. A Computerassisted Rhetorical Structure Analysis. (CBOTS 40). Uppsala: Almquist & Wiksell, 353 pages Winther-Nielsen, Nicolai. 2008. A Role-Lexical Module (RLM) for Biblical Hebrew: A mapping tool for RRG and WordNet. In R.D. Van Valin Jr, ed. Investigations of the Syntax-Semantics-Pragmatics Interface [SLCs 105], 455-478. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. find
9. Winther-Nielsen, Nicolai. 2009. Biblical Hebrew parsing on display: The Role-Lexical Module (RLM) as a tool for Role and Reference Grammar. SEE-J Hiphil 6 [http://hiphil.org/index.php/hiphil/arti-cle/view/43], 1-51 ↗
10. Winther-Nielsen, Nicolai. 2011. Persuasive Hebrew exercises: The wit of technology enhanced language learning. I: Peursen, Wido Th. van & Dyk, Janet W., eds., Tradition and Innovation in Biblical Interpretation. Studies Presented to Professor Eep Talstra on the Occasion of his Sixty-Fifth Birthday (Studia Semitica Neerlandica). Leiden: Brill, 277-298 find
11. Winther-Nielsen, Nicolai. 2012. Stones on Display in Joshua 6: The Linguistic Tree-Constructor as a ‘PLOT’ Tool. Journal of Hebrew Scriptures, Vol. 12, Article 17, 1-29 [http://www.jhsonline.org/JHS/Arti-cles/article_179.pdf] ↗ our card
12. Winther-Nielsen, Nicolai. 2013a. PLOTLearner as Persuasive Technology: Tool, Simulation and Virtual World for Language Learning. I: Behringer and Sinclair, IWEPLET 2013 Procedings, Paphos, 16.-17.September 2013, s. 21-28 find
13. Winther-Nielsen, Nicolai. 2013b. PLOTLearner for a Corpus of the Hebrew Bible: The Case for Repurposing in Language Learning, In Behringer R. and Sinclair G., s.53-60. find
14. Winther-Nielsen, Nicolai. 2014. PLOTLearner’s Persuasive Achievement: Force, Flow and Context in Technology for Language Learning from the Hebrew Bible. find
15. HIPHIL Novum, 2014; 1(2), s. 78-94 [http://hiphil.org/index.php/hiphil/article/view/57] ↗
16. Winther-Nielsen, Nicolai. 2016 How to Classify Hebrew Verbs: Plotting Verb-Specific Roles. In Contemporary Examinations of Classical Languages (Hebrew, Aramaic, and Syriac): Valency, Lexicography, Grammar, and Manuscripts, ed T. M. Lewis, A. Salvesen, og B. Turner. Perspectives on Linguistics and Ancient Languages 5. Piscataway, NJ.: Gorgias, s 67–94 find
17. Winther-Nielsen, Nicolai. 2017a. The Corpus as Tutor: Data-driven Persuasive Language Learning. I: HIPHIL Novum 4(1): 23-34 [http://hiphil.org/index.php/hiphil/article/view/81] ↗ our card
18. Winther-Nielsen, Nicolai. 2017b. Corpus-driven Valence: Give and the meaning of ןתנ nātan in Genesis. I: Advances in Biblical Hebrew Linguistics: Data, Methods, and Analyses, edited by Adina Moshavi and Tania Notarius. Eisenbrauns: Winona Lake, s. 363-385 find
19. Winther-Nielsen, Nicolai. 2017c. Interactive Tools and Tasks for the Hebrew Bible: From Language Learning to Textual Criticism. I: Special Issue on Computer-Aided Processing of Intertextuality in Ancient Languages. Journal of Mining and Digital Humanities. [Published October 27: https://jdmdh.episci-ences.org/4003], s. 1-27. ↗ our card
20. Winther-Nielsen, Nicolai and Eep Talstra. 1995. A Computational Display of the Book of Joshua. A Computer-assisted Analysis and Textual Interpretation. (Applicatio, vol. 13) Amsterdam: VU Press, 129 pages Winther-Nielsen, Nicolai; Claus Tøndering & Chris Wilson. 2009. “Transliteration of Biblical Hebrew for the Role-Lexical Module” Technical Report SEE-J Hiphil 6 [http://www.see-j.net/index.php/hiphil], 1-17 ↗

This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/hbo-2019-winther-nielsen-interfacing-hebrew-bible-past-present/