=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1749/paper41
|storemode=property
|title=May the Goddess of Hope Help Us. Homonymy in Latin Lexicon and Onomasticon
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1749/paper41.pdf
|volume=Vol-1749
|authors=Marco Passarotti,Marco Budassi
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/clic-it/PassarottiB16
}}
==May the Goddess of Hope Help Us. Homonymy in Latin Lexicon and Onomasticon==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1749/paper41.pdf
May the Goddess of Hope Help Us.
Homonymy in Latin Lexicon and Onomasticon
Marco Passarotti Marco Budassi
CIRCSE Research Centre Università di Pavia
Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore Corso Strada Nuova, 65
Largo Gemelli, 1 – 20123 Milan, Italy 27100 Pavia, Italy
marco.passarotti@unicatt.it marcobudassi@hotmail.it
homonymy is often tackled by using the
Abstract upper/lowercase distinction for the initial letter
of words, this solution is neither decisive (as
English. We present a study on the degree of uppercase letters can also be motivated by
homonymy between the lexicon of a punctuation) nor always available. The latter is
morphological analyser for Latin and an especially true for historical languages, as a large
Onomasticon. To understand the impact of amount of texts in such languages comes with no
homonymy, we discuss an experiment on
upper/lowercase distinction and it may follow
four Latin texts of different era and genre.
different editorial criteria.
Italiano. L’articolo presenta uno studio sul The recent extension of the lexical basis of the
grado di omonimia tra il lessico di un morphological analyser and lemmatiser for Latin
analizzatore morfologico per il latino e un Lemlat with an Onomasticon (i.e. a list of proper
Onomasticon. Al fine di comprendere names) makes it possible to evaluate the degree
l’impatto dell’omonimia, viene descritto un of homonymy of proper names in Latin and,
esperimento condotto su quattro testi latini di thus, to understand the extent of the
diversa epoca e genere. disambiguation task (Passarotti and Ruffolo,
2004). To this aim, in this paper we explore the
1 Introduction lexical basis of Lemlat as providing the empirical
Ambiguity affects linguistic analysis at various evidence supporting our analysis on homonymy
levels. In particular, homonymy plays a between names in the Onomasticon and words in
substantial role in the analysis of single words. the Latin lexicon.
Indeed, when considered out of context, one
2 Lemlat
same word can be assigned different Parts of
Speech (PoS), morphological features, lemmas Together with Morpheus (Crane, 1991) and
and meanings. Contextual disambiguation is the Whitaker’s Words, Lemlat (Passarotti, 2004) is
task of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools one of the most widespread tools for automatic
like PoS-taggers, morphological analysers, analysis of Latin morphology available. The
lemmatisers and word-sense disambiguators. original lexical basis of Lemlat (L) results from
The problem of ambiguity is particularly the collation of three Latin dictionaries (Georges
remarkable for NLP when Named Entity and Georges, 1913-1918; Glare, 1982;
Recognition (NER) is concerned. In order to Gradenwitz, 1904). It counts 40,014 lexical
automatically classify the textual occurrences of entries and 43,432 lemmas (as more than one
(multi)words into categories such as names of lemma can be included into the same lexical
persons, locations and organisations, NER faces entry). Such lexical basis was recently merged
that specific kind of ambiguity consisting in the with most of the Onomasticon (O) (26,250
homonymy between proper names and other lemmas out of 28,178) provided by the 5th
words in the lexicon (Nadeau and Sekine, 2007). edition of Lexicon Totius Latinitatis (Forcellini,
For instance, the word mark in English can be a 1940) (Budassi and Passarotti, 2016).
proper name, a noun or a verb. Although such
Since the large majority of lemmas in O are of Hope” in O. PH is represented, for instance,
nouns (19,599 out of 26,250), we will focus on by the word augustus, which is an adjective in L
them here, first by comparing their distribution in (“majestic”) and a noun in O (a cognomen given
L and O. Table 1 shows the number of nouns and to Octavius Caesar as emperor). The word spina
their percentage (on the total of nouns) in L and is a case of MH, being a first declension
O by inflectional category. feminine noun in L (“thorn”) and both a first
declension feminine noun (an old town in
Infl. Cat. Lemlat Onomasticon Aemilia) and a third declension masculine noun
I decl. 5,009 (22.26%) 6,651 (33.94%) with genitive in –anis (a river God) in O, the
former thus showing FH and the latter PH.
II decl. 7,466 (33.17%) 7,235 (36.92%) Table 2 presents the rates of homonymy in L
III decl. 8,677 (38.54%) 4,464 (22.77%) and O by each kind per inflectional category.
IV decl. 980 (4.35%) 58 (0.29%) The total number of homonyms is provided as
well (column “H”). This corresponds to the
V decl. 101 (0.45%) 6 (0.03%) number of nouns of an inflectional category that
Uninfl. 278 (1.23%) 1,185 (6.05%) are graphically identical in L and O. For
instance, the first row of table 2 shows that there
TOTAL 22,511 19,599
are 556 lemmas recorded as first declension
Table 1. Nouns in L and O. nouns (in L or O) that are identical to a lemma
occurring in the other section of the lexical basis
While third declension nouns are more of Lemlat. 383 lemmas out of these show FH, i.e.
frequent in L than in O, the opposite holds for they share not only the same graphical form but
first declension and (to a lesser extent) second also the same PoS, inflectional category and
declension nouns. The main difference between gender in L and O (column “FH”). Instead, 163
L and O concerns uninflected nouns, which are lemmas occur as graphically identical in L and O
much more in O than in L because of the large but do not have in common at least one among
number of loans recorded in O. PoS, inflectional category or gender (column
Also gender-based distribution of nouns by PH”). Finally, 10 lemmas show MH.
inflectional category shows substantial
differences between L and O. Among the most Infl. Cat. H FH PH MH
relevant is that O includes more first declension
masculine nouns than L (1,626 vs. 562). Instead, I decl. 556 383 163 10
the number of second declension neuter nouns is II decl. 752 307 389 56
larger in L than in O (4,005 vs. 1,523), because III decl. 584 334 226 24
O tends to include more proper names of persons
than of places, the latter being often assigned the IV decl. 85 9 73 3
neuter gender. As for third declension, feminine V decl. 6 5 1 0
nouns are more than masculine in L (5,112 vs. Uninfl. 60 0 60 0
2,590), while the opposite holds in O (2,847
masculine vs. 1,185 feminine). TOTAL 2,043 1,038 912 93
Table 2. Kinds of homonymy.
3 Mining Nominal Homonymy
Most of the PH instances for first declension
To categorise nominal homonymy in L and O,
lemmas are due to different gender. An example
we defined three kinds of homonymy: (a) Full
is the first declension noun caligula, which is
Homonymy (FH): words with the same lemma,
feminine in L (“a small military boot”) while it is
PoS, inflectional category and gender in L and
masculine in O (a cognomen). Second declension
O; (b) Partial Homonymy (PH): words with the
shows several cases of PoS change, like in the
same lemma in L and O, but with different PoS,
case of severus, which is an adjective in L
inflectional category or gender (the last for nouns
(“serious”) and a noun in O (a proper name).
only); (c) Mixed Homonymy (MH): words with
Instead, a large number of verb-noun changes
the same lemma in L and O and with more than
holds for third declension. This mostly occurs for
one PoS, inflectional category or gender, thus
imparisyllable nouns ending in –o, like cato,
resulting partly into FH and partly into PH.
which is a first conjugation verb in L (“to see”)
An example of FH in our data is the word
and a noun in O (a proper name).
spes, which means “hope” in L and “the Goddess
PH does not raise any tricky issue for NLP, Text L/O H FH PH MH
the task of PoS/morphological taggers being just (1) 618 405 303 88 14
that of disambiguating contextually PoS and
morphological features. Conversely, FH (2) 1,207 799 546 186 67
(including the FH-like part of MH) represents a (3) 686 486 330 120 36
challenging question for NLP. Indeed, if (4) 1,062 706 469 177 60
upper/lowercase distinction is not available in
input data, only context-based semantic Table 4. Overlapping and homonymy rates.
properties can disambiguate between candidate
lemmas affected by FH. For instance, in the Column “L/O” in table 4 reports the number
clause “spes est expectatio boni” (“hope is of words for each text that are analysed both by
expectation of good”, Cicero, Tusculanae, 4, 37, Lemlat and by LemlatON. The other columns
80) there is nothing but semantics to help us to show the homonymy rates by the kinds described
understand that the word spes is an occurrence of in Section 3. For instance, in the text of Caesar
the noun from L instead of the proper name from (1) there are 618 words analysed by both the
O. In order to evaluate the extent of homonymy versions of Lemlat (L/O). 405 out of them share
in real texts and to understand how much big the the same lemma in at least one analysis (H). This
impact of FH is, we performed the experiment is further detailed: 303 out of 405 show FH, 88
discussed in the next section. PH and 14 MH. An example of a word analysed
by both the versions of the tool that does not
4 Homonymy in Texts. A Case-study share the same lemma in all analyses is acie,
which is lemmatised under acies (“dagger”) by
We run Lemlat on four Latin texts of similar size Lemlat (fifth declension feminine noun) and also
and different genre and era.1 Table 3 shows the under the proper name acius by LemlatON
number of distinct words out of the total (column (second declension masculine noun). The word
“Types”) analysed by the original version of constantia is an example of H: it is lemmatised
Lemlat (column “Lemlat”) and by the one as a form of both lemmas consto (“to agree”;
enhanced with the Onomasticon (column first conjugation verb) and constantia
“LemlatON”). (“steadiness”; second declension feminine noun)
by Lemlat, and also as a form of both proper
Text Types Lemlat LemlatON Improv. names constantius (second declension masculine
(1) 3,092 2,888 3,039 +151 noun) and constantia (second declension
feminine noun) by LemlatON. The word
(2) 5,057 4,717 5,005 +288
constantia is also an example of FH, as the
(3) 3,542 3,357 3,487 +130 analyses provided by the two versions of Lemlat
(4) 4,589 4,292 4,537 +245 that share the same lemma have in common even
the same inflectional category and gender. PH is
Table 3. Results of Lemlat(ON) on four texts.
shown by the word crassi, which is assigned the
same lemma (crassus) both by Lemlat and by
Beside the words analysed by LemlatOn only
LemlatON, but while it is a first class adjective in
(column “Improv.”), there is a certain degree of
the former (“solid”), it is a second declension
overlapping between Lemlat and LemlatOn. The
masculine noun in the latter (a proper name). An
words falling in this ‘grey zone’ are those that
example of MH is the word amico, which is
are analysed both by Lemlat and by LemlatOn,
lemmatised under the lemma amicus (“friend”)
as they are lemmatised both under a lemma from
both by Lemlat and LemlatON. The lemma
L and under one from O. Among these words,
amicus is both an adjective and a second
those affected by homonymy are to be found.
declension masculine noun in Lemlat, but only
the latter analysis is shared with LemlatON,
because the lemma amicus in the Onomasticon is
recorded only as a noun and not also as an
1 adjective. Thus, when the word amico is
(1) Caesar, De Bello Gallico, 1 (Classical Lat., prose); (2)
Virgil, Aeneid, 1 & 2 (Classical Lat., poetry); (3) Tertullian, assigned PoS noun it shows FH, while when it is
Apologeticum (Late Lat., prose); (4) Claudian, De Raptu assigned PoS adjective it shows PH.
Proserpinae (Late Lat., poetry). All the texts were The proportions between the kinds of
downloaded from the Perseus Digital Library homonymy remain quite similar for all the texts.
(www.perseus.tufts.edu).
Words affected by H tend to be more than half of Lemlat with information about their distribution
L/O; among them the large majority is affected in a number of manually tagged reference texts.
by FH. By comparing columns “FH” and “MH”
in table 4 with column “Types” in table 3, one References
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5 Conclusion
We presented a study about the degree of
homonymy between the lexical basis of a
morphological analyser for Latin and an
Onomasticon recently added in the tool. We have
shown the impact of nominal homonymy on a
number of Latin texts of different era and genre.
Since the analysis of many homonymous
words can be disambiguated according to the
features of single texts (and authors), in the near
future we foresee to enhance such words in