GreLa

This repository contains the code for creating, maintaining, and enriching the GreLa corpus. The corpus is primarily available via a public web API (see below), which we recommend as the main access point. For long-term archival and offline use, we also provide the underlying database file (>8 GB), split into smaller chunks for easier upload and download. GreLa is a comprehensive corpus of Greek and Latin literature from the 8th c. BCE to the 17th c. CE.It currently contains more than 11,000 works, 21,000,000 sentences, and 350,000,000 tokens. GreLa is constructed as a merge of the following corpora: LAGT — Lemmatized Ancient Greek Texts, combining ancient Greek texts from the Perseus Digital Library, First 1,000 Years of Greek, Glaux, and OGA (v5.2; DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17865189). Corpus Corporum — a comprehensive corpus of Latin literature. NOSCEMUS — a curated database of Early Modern scientific literature (v1; DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.15040256). EMLAP — Early Modern Latin Alchemical Prints (v0.7; DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17834734). latin-lemmatized-texts — used here as a source for the lemmatized Vulgate. Corpus statistics grela_source works_N sentences_N tokens_N lagt 2,160 2,095,265 38,223,149 cc 7,819 14,229,691 254,770,887 noscemus 975 4,637,231 54,542,448 emlap 100 444,211 6,477,016 vulgate 73 35,254 603,091 GreLa is implemented as a relational database with three main tables: works, sentences, and tokens.The schema links tables through: grela_id — unique ID for each work (built as <subcorpus>_<work-id>, e.g., cc_12710) sentence_id — unique ID for each sentence (<grela_id>_<position>, e.g., cc_12710_0, cc_12710_1) Querying the corpus The tokens table allows searching by lemma, POS, and positional information (char_start, char_end).Where available, the ref JSON attribute encodes textual reference metadata (such as book/chapter/verse for biblical or otherwise structured texts). This varies significantly across subcorpora. The sentences table supports efficient search for multi-word string patterns in raw text. The works table contains rich metadata for each work. The fields not_before and not_after express a chronological interval. Ancient texts often require such interval dating, and GreLa supports temporal uncertainty using Monte Carlo modeling as described in this paper.Following this method, each work is also assigned a date_random point estimate sampled from its interval. Additionally, the works table provides identifiers such as: author_viaf author_wd (Wikidata QID) author_gnd as well as subcorpus-specific metadata stored uniformly in the subcorpus_specific_metadata JSON field. GreLa uses DuckDB, an efficient column-oriented analytical database engine optimized for complex queries over large datasets. Database Schema Documentation Table: sentences Column Name Data Type Is Nullable Default Value sentence_id VARCHAR YES N/A grela_id VARCHAR YES N/A position INTEGER YES N/A sent_text VARCHAR YES N/A Table: tokens Column Name Data Type Is Nullable Default Value sentence_id VARCHAR YES N/A grela_id VARCHAR YES N/A token_text VARCHAR YES N/A lemma VARCHAR YES N/A pos VARCHAR YES N/A ref JSON YES N/A char_start INTEGER YES N/A char_end INTEGER YES N/A token_id BIGINT YES N/A Table: works Column Name Data Type Is Nullable Default Value grela_source VARCHAR YES N/A grela_id VARCHAR YES N/A author VARCHAR YES N/A title VARCHAR YES N/A not_before INTEGER YES N/A not_after INTEGER YES N/A date_random INTEGER YES N/A provenience VARCHAR YES N/A place_publication VARCHAR YES N/A place_geonames VARCHAR YES N/A author_viaf VARCHAR YES N/A author_wd VARCHAR YES N/A author_gnd VARCHAR YES N/A title_viaf VARCHAR YES N/A subcorpus_specific_metadata JSON YES N/A Getting Started GreLa is accessible via a public web API.To get started, see the introductory Colab notebook: 👉 GreLa API – getting started License The GreLa code, schema, and derived metadata are released underCC BY-SA 4.0 (see LICENSE.md). The underlying texts and some annotations inherit the licences of the source corpora: LAGT (Perseus, First 1K Greek, GLAUx, OGA): CC BY-SA 4.0 Corpus Corporum: mix of CC BY-SA 4.0 and public-domain texts NOSCEMUS: CC BY 4.0 EMLAP: CC BY-SA 4.0 latin-lemmatized-texts (Vulgate): public-domain text, CC BY-SA 4.0 annotations When reusing GreLa data, please: Cite GreLa and the relevant source corpus (LAGT, Corpus Corporum, NOSCEMUS, EMLAP, latin-lemmatized-texts, …). Follow both the GreLa CC BY-SA 4.0 licence and the licence(s) of the original corpus for the texts you use. Version History 0.6 input data in unified format EMLAP extended to all 100 works CC input derived from lemmatized XML with ref metadata works table enriched with VIAF, Wikidata ID, GND subcorpus-specific attributes unified into subcorpus_specific_metadata 0.5 various minor improvements 0.4 significantly improved Greek sentence and token segmentation added ref attribute for Greek works 0.1 first version of GreLa Roadmap ref attribute documentation add collaborators as coauthors based on agreement document licences for all source corpora more identifiers for works and authors (e.g., PHI IDs for Latin texts) provenance metadata for Latin texts standardized spatial metadata for works and authors ULTIMATE GOAL: a bilingual (Greek and Latin) database-wide token-level and sentence-level contextual embeddings, based on a fine-tuned BERT model allowing (1) diachronic word sense induction & disambiguation and (2) fast retrieval of similar passages, paraphrases, and allusions across the two languages