Automatic Annotation of Nomina Sacra

Abstract

Nomina sacra are a specific kind of named entities appearing in biblical manuscripts. Due to the large amount of biblical manuscripts, many questions about nomina sacra could not be answered to the present time. In order to use the methods of Digital Humanities for research questions on nomina sacra, they need to be consistently and accurately annotated. We report on our recent efforts on combining Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) with annotation for biblical manuscripts written in Greek majuscule script. We reflect on the lessons learned from this work, especially on the technical aspects such as the available NER algorithms for classical languages, the performance of machine-learning based tools in comparison to rule-based annotation algorithms. We also discuss the pro’s and con’s of the approach we chose in our work.