Translation Alignment: Ancient Greek to English. Annotation Style Guide and Gold Standard.

This dataset contains guidelines and a gold standard for the alignment of Ancient Greek texts with English translations.

The guidelines were used to annotate a diverse dataset including Homeric epic, Attic prose, and Platonic dialogue, and were tested by measuring inter-annotator agreement of 80% or higher. The Ancient Greek texts used are almost entirely available through the Scaife viewer (https://scaife.perseus.org/).

The datasets used to develop the gold standard were aligned using the Ugarit Translation Alignment Editor for Historical languages (http://ugarit.ialigner.com/).

The materials available here can be used to perform and evaluate alignments of various texts in Ancient Greek, to create new gold standard corpora, and to train automated translation models.

The guidelines can also be further adapted to address similar language pairs including an inflected and a synthetic language, such as Latin and English, or can provide a structure for the alignment of other historical texts against modern translations. However, the guidelines are not project-specific: they were specifically intended for the creation of a Gold Standard in the scenario of machine translation. Different scenarios, such as language research or pedagogy, may need further tweaking to these guidelines to make them more compatible with different underlying principles.

For further information on Ugarit and translation alignment of historical languages, see http://ugarit.ialigner.com/bib.php and follow us on Twitter (@ugarit_ty).