LAF-Fabric: a data analysis tool for Linguistic Annotation Framework with an application to the Hebrew Bible
This tool addresses the need for efficient data analysis in linguistic research, specifically for annotated biblical texts, but it is incremental as it builds on existing frameworks.
The paper introduces LAF-Fabric, a tool for analyzing Linguistic Annotation Framework resources, applied to the Hebrew Bible corpus, enabling projects like studying linguistic variation, Hebrew poetry grammar, and parser construction.
The Linguistic Annotation Framework (LAF) provides a general, extensible stand-off markup system for corpora. This paper discusses LAF-Fabric, a new tool to analyse LAF resources in general with an extension to process the Hebrew Bible in particular. We first walk through the history of the Hebrew Bible as text database in decennium-wide steps. Then we describe how LAF-Fabric may serve as an analysis tool for this corpus. Finally, we describe three analytic projects/workflows that benefit from the new LAF representation: 1) the study of linguistic variation: extract cooccurrence data of common nouns between the books of the Bible (Martijn Naaijer); 2) the study of the grammar of Hebrew poetry in the Psalms: extract clause typology (Gino Kalkman); 3) construction of a parser of classical Hebrew by Data Oriented Parsing: generate tree structures from the database (Andreas van Cranenburgh).