A Rule-Based Parsing System for Encoding Kennicott's Collation of the Hebrew Bible

What it is about

A slide deck from a PhD project on a digital critical edition of Qohelet. Kennicott's 1776–80 collation records variants from some 600 medieval Hebrew manuscripts and prints (about 1.5 million pieces of information), but exists only as page images. The pipeline: OCR with Tesseract and hand correction; a context-free grammar (ANTLR 4) for the terse "language" of the apparatus (verse place, lemma, variant readings, manuscript sigla, notes such as "primo", "nunc", "forte"); a visitor that emits XML, converted to TEI by XSLT. For Qohelet all 2 617 variants were parsed and encoded; on Ruth (1 025) and Song of Songs (1 238) the unchanged grammar reached 99%, and 100% after extending it. The grammar doubles as a spell-checker that catches OCR errors and inconsistencies in the print. The variants (119 witnesses, 371 variants) were then turned into a matrix and fed to a parsimony program (PAUP); the consensus of over 25 000 equally parsimonious trees shows little structure, since the variants are consonantal, mostly arise independently, and witnesses are contaminated.

Ideas

I1. Parse any formal apparatus or index by a written grammar whose failures are reported, not guessed: the same pattern Mova uses for MACULA could read the Masorah notes or the ketiv/qere lists if we ever take them in; a parse failure is a flag on the OCR or the source.
I2. A negative result to cite: stemmatic trees from medieval Hebrew consonantal variants are unstable (thousands of equally good trees), so chapter 1 or 12 should not present manuscript genealogy as settled.

For Mova

I1 is a method note for any future source in tools/macula or for the ketiv/qere material of 1. Script and pointing; nothing to build now. I2 is a sentence for 01-script.md (the text and its witnesses) or 12-biblical-mishnaic-modern.md. The paper concerns textual criticism rather than grammar, so its yield for Mova is small.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.26226/morressier.5fd8d8c83d762219be34f4c6

@misc{bambaci2020rule,
  title = {{A Rule-Based Parsing System for Encoding Kennicott's Collation of the Hebrew Bible}},
  author = {Bambaci, Luigi},
  year = {2020},
  doi = {10.26226/morressier.5fd8d8c83d762219be34f4c6},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.26226/morressier.5fd8d8c83d762219be34f4c6}
}

References

15 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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