Organizers: Federica Iurescia – Eleonora Litta – Marco C. Passarotti
Contact information for questions: eleonoramaria.litta@unicatt.it and federica.iurescia@unicatt.it
Please send abstract to: lvlt2026@ateneo.univr.it
This workshop addresses the evolving landscape of computational resources for the study of Latin, with a special focus on the Late and Vulgar variety. While the last decades have seen remarkable progress in the creation of digital corpora, lexical databases, and annotation standards for Classical Latin, the specific challenges posed by later varieties—including textual heterogeneity, orthographic variation, multilingual contexts, fragmentary transmission—remain only partially addressed. As a result, the study of non-Classical Latin often lacks the same computational support available for other periods and languages.
The aim of the workshop is to provide a dedicated forum for discussing and showcasing language resources and NLP tools that can enhance research on Late and Vulgar Latin. We encourage two types of contributions: (1) position papers outlining desiderata, methodological challenges, or theoretical issues in adapting computational approaches to post-Classical Latin; (2) presentations of projects, corpora, or tools, and their exploitation for concrete research questions. In this way, the workshop seeks both to map the current state of the art and to set the agenda for future developments.
Key topics include (but are not limited to):
- Corpora of Late and Vulgar Latin (digitisation, annotation, interoperability);
- Lexical and morphological resources tailored to non-Classical varieties;
- Orthographic and dialectal variation as challenges for NLP;
- Applications (and evaluation) of POS-tagging, lemmatisation, and syntactic parsing;
- Semantic resources and linked data for Late Latin texts;
- Integration of philological methods with computational approaches;
- Case studies exploiting computational tools for linguistic, literary, or historical analysis.
Submission type: 500 word abstract max excluding bibliography; not anonymous
References
Burns, P. J. (2019). “Building a Text Analysis Pipeline for Classical Languages”. In Berti, M. (Ed.) Digital Classical Philology. Ancient Greek and Latin in the Digital Revolution. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Saur.
Passarotti, M. (2010). “Leaving behind the less-resourced status. the case of latin through the experience of the index thomisticus treebank”. In 7th SaLTMiL Workshop on Creation and use of basic lexical resources for less-resourced languages LREC 2010, Valetta, Malta, 23 May 2010 Workshop programme (p. 27).
Passarotti, M., Mambrini, F., Franzini, G., Cecchini, F. M., Litta, E., Moretti, G., … & Sprugnoli, R. (2020). “Interlinking through lemmas. the lexical collection of the LiLa Knowledge Base of linguistic resources for Latin”. Studi e Saggi Linguistici, 58(1), 177-212.
Piotrowski, M. (2012 ). “Natural language processing for historical texts.” Synthesis lectures on human language technologies 5.2, pp. 1-157.
Sommerschield, T., Assael, Y., Pavlopoulos, J., Stefanak, V., Senior, A., Dyer, C., … & De Freitas, N. (2023). “Machine learning for ancient languages: A survey”. Computational Linguistics, 49(3), pp. 703-747.
Sprugnoli R., Passarotti M., Cecchini F. M., Pellegrini M., (2020). “Overview of the EvaLatin 2020 Evaluation Campaign”, in Sprugnoli R., Passarotti M. (Eds.), Proceedings of LT4HALA 2020 Workshop – 1st Workshop on Language Technologies for Historical and Ancient Languages, satellite event to the Twelfth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), European Language Resources Association (ELRA), Paris, pp. 105-110.