Identification of Parallel Passages Across a Large Hebrew/Aramaic Corpus
This addresses the challenge of text analysis for scholars working with historical Hebrew/Aramaic texts like the Babylonian Talmud, though it is incremental as it builds on existing methods for parallel passage detection.
The paper tackles the problem of efficiently identifying parallel passages in a large Hebrew/Aramaic corpus despite rephrasing and orthographic variations, achieving over 4600 pairs found in just over 30 seconds with coverage comparable to slow exhaustive methods.
We propose a method for efficiently finding all parallel passages in a large corpus, even if the passages are not quite identical due to rephrasing and orthographic variation. The key ideas are the representation of each word in the corpus by its two most infrequent letters, finding matched pairs of strings of four or five words that differ by at most one word and then identifying clusters of such matched pairs. Using this method, over 4600 parallel pairs of passages were identified in the Babylonian Talmud, a Hebrew-Aramaic corpus of over 1.8 million words, in just over 30 seconds. Empirical comparisons on sample data indicate that the coverage obtained by our method is essentially the same as that obtained using slow exhaustive methods.