Patrick J. Burns

Associate Research Scholar, Digital Projects @ Institute for the Study of the Ancient World / NYU | Formerly Culture Cognition, and Coevolution Lab (Harvard) & Quantitative Criticism Lab (UT-Austin) | Fordham PhD, Classics | LatinCy developer

How to Fix Your First Billion Latin Typos: AI & Philology at Astronomical Scale

Abstract for invited talk at the University of Massachusetts Boston

University of Massachusetts Boston, Boston, MA

Keywords

Latin, computational philology, textual criticism, large language models, agentic AI

Abstract

Decades of mass digitization projects have given Latinists access to thousands upon thousands of scanned books online (Marcum and Schonfeld 2021). These scanned books also offer computational Latinists billions of words upon which to train state-of-the-art language models for tasks like question answering, text summarization, and machine translation, among others (Bamman and Burns 2020; Riemenschneider and Frank 2023). That said, due to the extremely variable quality of optical character recognition (OCR), we are as likely to find among these volumes quality Latin stretches like eadem dicta esse repertum sit as we are to find catastrophically corrupt stretches like fim ego exf€r$mJkm)iMdem (Bamman n.d.). Correcting texts has long been a central concern of philology through the art of textual criticism (West 1973; Tarrant 2016). As James Zetzel (Zetzel 2015: 54) writes, the work of the philologist can be thought of as “reconstructing what [was] written rather than enshrining or embalming the errors transmitted.” Yet when our scope is in the tens of billions of words—and the errors too number in the billions—the work is clearly beyond human scale. In this talk, I discuss my research over the last year in developing computational methods for discovering and resolving error-prone Latin text in collections that can only be described as astronomical (e.g. LLM training data repositories), including the idea of deploying and learning to “trust” agentic AI in the development of philological “self-correcting systems” (Harari 2024). The key questions—when we see a Latin typo online, how is it that we as Latin experts know how to fix the error, how do we program a computer to do the same, and how do we encourage human-computer collaboration in addressing this task? While examples will be drawn from my Latin-focused research agenda, the talk should be of interest to anyone concerned about the role of AI methods in humanities research (Mollick 2024; Beguš 2025).

Bibliography

• Bamman, D. n.d. “11K Latin Texts.” n.d. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dbamman/latin.html.
• Bamman, D., and Burns, P.J. 2020. “Latin BERT: A Contextual Language Model for Classical Philology.” September 21. http://arxiv.org/abs/2009.10053.
• Beguš, N. 2025. Artificial Humanities: A Fictional Perspective on Language in AI. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. doi:10.3998/mpub.12778936.
• Harari, Y.N. 2024. Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI. New York: Random House.
• Marcum, D., and Schonfeld, R.C. 2021. Along Came Google: A History of Library Digitization. Princeton: Princeton University Press. doi:10.1515/9780691208039.
• Mollick, E. 2024. Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI. New York: Portfolio/Penguin.
• Riemenschneider, F., and Frank, A. 2023. “Exploring Large Language Models for Classical Philology.” In Rogers, A., Boyd-Graber, J., and Okazaki, N. eds. Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). Toronto, Canada: Association for Computational Linguistics. 15181–99. doi:10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.846. https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.846/.
• Tarrant, R. 2016. Texts, Editors, and Readers: Methods and Problems in Latin Textual Criticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• West, M.L. 1973. Textual Criticism and Editorial Technique Applicable to Greek and Latin Texts. Stuttgart: Teubner.
• Zetzel, J.E.G. 2015. “The Bride of Mercury: Confessions of a ’Pataphilologist.” In Pollock, S. ed. World Philology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 45–62.