Invited Talk at the Lectio Conference 2021
Marco Passarotti will participate to the 10th International Lectio Conference (“Imagining the Future of Pre-Modern Intellectual History”, http://lectio.ghum.kuleuven.be/lectio/conferences) with a talk on Wednesday, 2nd June 2021 (10:30-11:00).
The conference will be organized online; registration open until 31st May 2021: https://form.jotform.com/210814228308046
Title: A Journey in Linguistic Computing from Father Busa to Linguistic Linked Data.
Abstract: Starting from the pioneering work of father Roberto Busa on processing the texts of Thomas Aquinas with IBM computers, the talk provides an overview of the research area of Linguistic Computing from the fifties until the present day. The talk specifically focusses on the role of linguistic data in the field, discussing (a) the shift from rule-based to data-driven approaches in natural language processing, as well as from constituency to dependency grammars in annotated corpora, and (b) the need of interoperability between linguistic resources, nowadays made possible by the application of the so-called Linked Data principles to linguistic data.
The different phases in the history of Linguistic Computing discussed during the talk will be presented in the light of those of the Index Thomisticus corpus by father Busa : from the registration of the Latin texts of Thomas Aquinas in machine-readable format (on punched cards), to their lemmatization and morphological annotation (in the Index Thomisticus corpus), until their syntactic analysis (in the Index Thomisticus Treebank) and, finally, their interoperability with the (meta)data provided by other linguistic resources for Latin distributed on the web (in the LiLa Knowledge Base).