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

Automatic Vocabulary Lists: NLP Experiments toward a Pedagogical Goal

Abstract for talk at Fordham Preparatory School

Fordham Preparatory School, Bronx, NY

Abstract

Using Pliny the Younger’s letter on Vesuvius as a case study, I discuss take up the following task: given a plaintext passage of Latin, how can leverage natural language processing methods, tools, and dataset to produce publication-ready vocabulary lists, i.e. the kinds of well-formatted word lists that a printed in textbooks to support student learning. With looks at tokenization, lemmatization, part-of-speech tagging, lexical expansion, word frequency analysis, word sense disambiguation, and other NLP techniques, I introduce core NLP methods and frame the vocabulary list as an example of what Jeanette Wing has called “computational thinking,” that is a way of formulating problems as series of smaller formal tasks. I conclude with an honest assessment of the current state of Latin NLP and where the greatest opportunities can be found for computationally curious Latin students.