Ugarit

Available

• http://ugarit.ialigner.com/

Author

• Tariq Yousef

Description

Ugarit is an online environment to perform manual translation alignment of texts. It provides an editor where users can import their corpora and align them manually, and publish them immediately in the homepage. The editor enables alignment of two or three texts, and it supports most ancient and Classical languages. Users can perform four levels of alignment: word-to-word (1-1), word-to-phrase (1-N), phrase-to-word (N-1) and phrase-to-phrase (N-N).

The Ugarit homepage provides an interactive reading environment where users can read available aligned texts, click on aligned words to trigger a dynamic lexicon, and search for already aligned words. The reader also provides an automatic transliterator for non-Latin alphabets, basic statistics on published alignments, and two export options (XML or CSV).

The Ugarit database provides training data, in the form of translation pairs, for the development of automated translation alignment models targeted at ancient languages. Most recently, Yousef et al. (2022) have published a transformer-based model that uses Ugarit alignments for fine-tuning in Ancient Greek.

See also: Translation Alignment.

References

• Yousef, T., Palladino, C., Shamsian, F., Ferreira, A., & Reis, M. 2022. An automatic model and Gold Standard for translation alignment of Ancient Greek. In Proceedings of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (pp. 5894–5905). European Language Resources Association.
• Yousef, T., Palladino, C., Wright, D., & Berti, M. 2022. Automatic Translation Alignment for Ancient Greek and Latin. In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Language Technologies for Historical and Ancient Languages (pp. 101–107). European Language Resources Association.
• Palladino, C., Shamsian, F.,& Yousef, T. 2021). Translation Alignment for Historical Language Learning: a Case Study. 1st Annual Conference of Computational Literary Studies. https://doi.org/10.48694/jcls.100
• Yousef T., Palladino C., Shamsian F., & Foradi M. Translation Alignment with Ugarit. 2021. Information, 13(2):65. https://doi.org/10.3390/info13020065
• Palladino, C., Foradi, M.,& Yousef, T. 2021. Translation Alignment for Historical Language Learning: a Case Study. DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly, 15(3).
• Palladino, C. 2020. Reading Texts in Digital Environments: Applications of Translation Alignment for Classical Language Learning. Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, 18.
• Yousef, T. 2020. Ugarit, translation alignment visualization. OSF Preprints. Available: https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/thsp5.

Alignment Guidelines and Gold Standards

• General resource: Available alignment guidelines for ancient and modern languages: https://ugarit.ialigner.com/guidelines.php
• Alignment Gold Standard and Guidelines for Ancient Greek into English, Latin and Portuguese: https://github.com/UgaritAlignment/Alignment-Gold-Standards

Presentations

• Megan Bushnell & Chiara Palladino. 2024. Text Alignment. SunoikisisDC.
• M. Berti, C. Palladino, D.J. Wright, T. Yousef. 2022. Translation Alignment for Ancient Greek and Latin. SunoikisisDC.
• C. Palladino, F. Shamsian, M. Shukhosvili. 2021. Translation and Text Alignment. Sunoikisis Digital Classics Fall 2021.
• C. Palladino & T. Yousef. 2021. "We want to learn all languages! Applications of translation alignment in digital environments." Digital Classics London Seminar. Available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2Ms6yAMZss
• F. Shamsian. 2020. Summer 2020: Digital classics and learning Greek in Iran. Sunoikisis Digital Classics session and video, Summer 2020.

Reviews

• Sisi Xie. 2023. "Textual Alignment of Res Gestae: Translation in Historical Languages. Commenting on the Ugarit alignment tool." Stoa Review 2023-01-26. Available: https://blog.stoa.org/archives/4182