This paper introduces a spelling correction system which integrates seamlessly with morphological analysis using a multi-tape formalism. Handling of various Semitic error problems is illustrated, with reference to Arabic and Syriac examples. The model handles errors vocalisation, diacritics, phonetic syncopation and morphographemic idiosyncrasies, in addition to Damerau errors. A complementary correction strategy for morphologically sound but morphosyntactically ill-formed words is outlined.

This reflection presents a historical narrative surrounding the term language archives. Three elements are highlighted: (1) the history of the use of the term, (2) the sociological connections between individual voices central to the modern development of language archives, and (3) the evolution of metadata schemas across institutions in newly established language archives. By highlighting these points I contrast a narrative developed within language documentation [51, 73] and the Open Language Archives Community [9, 10]—that language archives are a new innovation. I center a substantial number of obscure digital publications and primary archival resources. This historical view and the links to original source materials are helpful to new information professionals and language scholars.

This paper demonstrates how the challenging problem of the Arabic broken plurals and diminutive can be handled under a multi-tape two-level model, an extension to two-level morphology.

This paper constitutes the first formal report of the Arabic-Syriac Lexicon project, from The Syriac Computing Institute. We show here a practical method for compiling an electronic lexicon, based on published lexica, for Semitic languages. Our method, though is not a computational morphology system, makes a practical use of the root-and-pattern nature of Semitic morphology.

This paper describes an algorithm for the compilation of a two (or more) level orthographic or phonological rule notation into finite state transducers. The notation is an alternative to the standard one deriving from Koskenniemi's work: it is believed to have some practical descriptive advantages, and is quite widely used, but has a different interpretation. Efficient interpreters exist for the notation, but until now it has not been clear how to compile to equivalent automata in a transparent way. The present paper shows how to do this, using some of the conceptual tools provided by Kaplan and Kay's regular relations calculus.

This paper establishes a framework under which various aspects of prosodic morphology, such as templatic morphology and infixation, can be handled under two-level theory using an implemented multi-tape two-level model. The paper provides a new computational analysis of root-and-pattern morphology based on prosody.

Between the 1870s and the mid-twentieth century an extraordinary cluster of bio-bibliographical reference works attempted to enumerate, describe, and thereby define the literary heritage written in Arabic. Some were produced by Middle Eastern scholars — Sunni (Ismāʿīl Pasha al-Bābānī, Khayr al-Dīn al-Ziriklī, ʿUmar Riḍā Kaḥḥāla, Yūsuf Sarkīs), Shiʿi (Āghā Buzurg al-Ṭihrānī, and around him Ḥasan al-Ṣadr and Muḥsin al-Amīn), Christian (Jurjī Zaydān, Louis Cheikho) — while others came from European orientalists working in the Literaturgeschichte mode: Brockelmann on “the Arabic literature” writ large, in fact excluding for the most part non-Muslim authors; Graf on Christian Arabic literature; Steinschneider on Jewish Arabic literature and on interconfessional polemic itself. Usually studied in isolation, each within its own confessional or disciplinary historiography, they are read here as a single, densely interconnected field, through the concept of “co-production” recently proposed by Katharina Heyden and David Nirenberg for the entangled histories of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The wager is that the modern bibliography of Arabic letters — its canons, its categories (“Islamic,” “Christian Arabic,” “Shiʿi,” “Jewish-Arabic” literature), and even its descriptive techniques (the title-entry, the incipit, the author notice, the shelfmark) — was co-produced in competitive, asymmetrical, often polemical, but genuinely mutual engagement among Muslim, Christian, Jewish, and European scholars, and between all of them and a reactivated seventeenth-century Ottoman matrix, Kātip Çelebi’s Kashf al-ẓunūn. A second claim concerns the channel. Co-production here ran through an identifiable body of paperwork — letters, proof sheets, offprints, journal installments, manuscript catalogs and handlists, dealers’ slips and publishers’ catalogs, unpublished inventories — and can therefore be studied at the resolution of a single entry. Doing so reveals what the framework does not predict: the channel was lossy. Information traveling from a private library in Najaf to a printed line in Leiden was selected twice, compressed, occasionally garbled, stripped of its informants’ doubts, and detached from their names. The loss ran the other way too: a German manuscript catalog, whose Arabic titles and incipits could be taken over verbatim while the German reasoning around them could not, entered the Arabic reference tradition shorn of the conjectures that had produced it, in one case transferring a whole oeuvre to the wrong Yemeni scholar — an error still resolved incorrectly by a Gulf library’s electronic catalog today. What the channel loses, in both directions, is rarely the datum but its epistemic status: the hedge, the ground, the name of the person who was unsure. The finished reference entry, the most authoritative-looking sentence in the field, is thus the point at which co-production becomes hardest to see, and at which its errors become permanent.

Esta contribución examina el uso léxico en las escenas egipcias de la versión griega del Antiguo Testamento, y en concreto, la reacción de Filón de Alejandría a dicho uso. Para este fin, se han seleccionado tres escenas de carácter egipcio, la del sueño de las siete vacas, la del jarrillo de plata y la del nacimiento de Moisés. En estos tres pasajes, el texto griego de los Setenta utiliza préstamos léxicos de origen egipcio. Tanto Filón, como las otras versiones griegas del Antiguo Testamento los evitan, mientras que los posteriores autores cristianos los respetan. Palabras clave: Filón de Alejandría, Setenta, Septuaginta, préstamos léxicos, lengua egipcia This contribution examines the lexical usage in the Egyptian scenes of the Greek version of the Old Testament, and specifically, Philo of Alexandria's reaction to such usage. For this purpose, three “Egyptian” scenes have been selected, that of the dream of the seven cows, that of the silver vase, and that of the birth of Moses. In these three passages, the Greek text of the Septuagint uses lexical borrowings of Egyptian origin. Both Philo and the other Greek versions of the Old Testament avoid them, while later Christian authors respect them.

For historical reasons, the libraries of Yemen (many of them established during the 12th and 13th centuries) preserve up until today the bulk of Islam's rationalist heritage, as expressed in a rich body of literature of discursive theology, legal theory, and Qur'anic exegesis which propagates the primacy of reason over scriptural sources. None of this literature has survived elsewhere in the Islamic world and its rationalist bias is in fact one of the primary reasons prompting Salafis to try and physically destroy the Yemenite manuscript collections. They are aided in their endeavor by the war that has afflicted the country since 2015. When several Egyptian expeditions visited Yemen during the 1950s and 1960s and microfilmed some select manuscript materials, the subsequent publication of these texts led to the rise, in Egypt, Iran, and Indonesia, of a new rationalist movement within Islam: the Neo-Mu'tazila, this despite the fact that the Egyptian expeditions only uncovered the tip of the iceberg. Today's digital technology offers entirely new possibilities to secure the Yemeni literary heritage from destruction and to make it available through open access to Muslim intellectuals worldwide. It further allows for digital repatriation of the extensive holdings of manuscripts of Yemeni provenance in Western libraries. The idea is to democratize access to a unique corpus of literature which will be instrumental in creating a powerful countervoice to the prevailing Salafi trend and will serve as an effective support for moderate strands in the Islamic world. The Zaydi Manuscript Tradition (ZMT) aims at salvaging the Zaydi literary tradition by gathering digital surrogates of as many Zaydi manuscripts as possible in a single repository and providing comprehensive and systematic open access to them for scholars worldwide, regardless of whether the physical manuscripts are preserved in Europe or in North America, in Yemen, or elsewhere in the Middle East. The ZMT is a joint project initiated by the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), Princeton, in partnership with the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library (HMML) at Saint John’s University, Collegeville, Minnesota.

This paper presents an implemented multi-tape two-level model capable of describing Semitic non-linear morphology. The computational framework behind the current work is motivated by [Kay 1987]; the formalism presented here is an extension to the formalism reported by [Pulman and Hepple 1993]. The objectives of the current work are: to stay as close as possible, in spirit, to standard two-level morphology, to stay close to the linguistic description of Semitic stems, and to present a model which can he used with case by the Semitist. The paper illustrates that if finite-state transducers (FSTs) in a standard two-level morphology model are replaced with multi-tape auxiliary versions (AFSTs), one can account for Semitic root-and-pattern morphology using high level notation.

Foundation models are powerful technologies: how they are released publicly directly shapes their societal impact. In this position paper, we focus on open foundation models, defined here as those with broadly available model weights (e.g. Llama 3, Stable Diffusion XL). We identify five distinctive properties of open foundation models (e.g. greater customizability, poor monitoring) that mediate their benefits and risks. Open foundation models present significant benefits, with some caveats, that span innovation, competition, the distribution of decision-making power, and transparency. To understand their risks of misuse, we design a risk assessment framework for analyzing their marginal risk. Across several misuse vectors (e.g. cyberattacks, bioweapons), we find that current research is insufficient to effectively characterize the marginal risk of open foundation models relative to pre-existing technologies. The framework helps explain why the marginal risk is low in some cases, clarifies disagreements about misuse risks by revealing that past work has focused on different subsets of the framework with different assumptions, and articulates a way forward for more constructive debate. Overall, our work supports a more grounded assessment of the societal impact of open foundation models by outlining what research is needed to empirically validate their theoretical benefits and risks.

This volume documents a groundbreaking convening on January 28, 2017 in The Met’s Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium, inspired by the exhibition Kerry James Marshall: Mastry on view at The Met Breuer October 25, 2016–January 29, 2017. During the daylong event twenty noted thought leaders and creative practitioners considered the role of creativity, hard work, social justice, and imagination in art history, performance, science, and other disciplines inspired by visual artist Kerry James Marshall’s practice and work. The event was a mix of rich extended conversations and exciting nine-minute performances and presentations.