Preprocessing Ancient Texts with the Classical Language Toolkit (CLTK)

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Preprocessing Ancient Texts with the Classical Language Toolkit (CLTK)

Are you tired of manually preprocessing ancient texts for your research in Near Eastern studies? Fear not! The Classical Language Toolkit (CLTK) is here to help!

What is CLTK?

The CLTK is a Python library that provides natural language processing (NLP) tools for ancient languages, including Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, and Old English. With the CLTK, you can tokenize, lemmatize, and part-of-speech tag texts, as well as perform other common NLP tasks.

Installing CLTK

Before we get started, make sure you have Python 3 installed. Then, you can install the CLTK using pip:

pip install cltk

Loading Texts

Once you have the CLTK installed, you can start loading texts. Let’s load the Iliad by Homer:

import cltk
from cltk.corpus.utils.importer import CorpusImporter
corpus_importer = CorpusImporter('greek')
corpus_importer.import_corpus('tlg') # import the TLG corpus
corpus_importer.import_corpus('phi5') # import the PHI5 corpus
from cltk.corpus.readers import get_corpus_reader
reader = get_corpus_reader(corpus_name='tlg', language='greek')
iliad = reader.raw('tlg0012.tlg001') # load the Iliad

Tokenizing Texts

Now that we have the Iliad loaded, let’s tokenize it:

from cltk.tokenize.word import WordTokenizer
tokenizer = WordTokenizer('greek')
tokens = tokenizer.tokenize(iliad)

Part-of-Speech Tagging

We can also perform part-of-speech tagging on the tokens:

from cltk.tag.pos import POSTag
tagger = POSTag('greek')
tagged_tokens = tagger.tag_ngram_123_backoff(tokens)

Lemmatizing Texts

Finally, we can lemmatize the tokens:

from cltk.lemmatize.backoff import BackoffGreekLemmatizer
lemmatizer = BackoffGreekLemmatizer()
lemmas = [lemmatizer.lemmatize(token) for token in tokens]

And that’s it! With just a few lines of code, we’ve tokenized, part-of-speech tagged, and lemmatized an ancient Greek text. Now, go forth and preprocess with ease!

Figure 1: This is the logo of CLTK

Why did the linguist break up with the CLTK? Because it kept tokenizing everything!

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