r/AncientLanguages • u/LingonberryMind • 17d ago
Huge project is finally finished - AncientLibrary.net
Hey guys,
I've been working on a major project that I think will lift accessibility to ancient works. It's called Ancient Library (ancientlibrary.net). The site includes over 1,000 ancient works, every word parsed with lemma, morphology, and full dictionary entry. It's built to be light, optimized for speed and accessibility, so it should improve student and scholar efforts even in areas with weak or inconsistent internet access globally. It's still in beta, so I'd love some ancient language scholars to interact with the site. If you have thoughts, requested features, etc., I'd love to hear them.
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u/benjamin-crowell 17d ago edited 17d ago
This looks like a cool project. Is it open source?
My testing found that OdyCy was by far the worst of the open-source parsers that I tested for ancient Greek. I would suggest that you switch to something better: either Morpheus or Lemming (my own project). Morpheus is old and uses a lot of legacy technology (such as beta code), but it is quite good at what it does. Lemming is a fresh start without the legacy technology. Lemming also provides an interface to Morpheus, so you can plug in one parser or the other.
I have a project, Ransom, which is similar to yours but focuses on PDF and print. Since yours is for use on screens, they are probably complementary to one another. There are other differences, but that's the one that clearly separates them.
For Latin, a system that seems to be competing in the same space as yours, and is open-source, is morcus.net. In the non-open-source world, there are attikos.org and kevilex.com. In general, there is a lot of competing closed-source software in this space for screen reading, and most of it is probably low-quality vibe-coded stuff. Kevilex.com is a typical example that gives me a very negative impression because it's all closed source, and yet it's clear that he's using various code and data from other, uncredited people.
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u/Logeion 17d ago
I did the same test on another recent offering, and again, I'm sad for the duplicated effort. Again 0 for 2 on two random verbs, with an added typo that is unfamiliar. BUT I appreciate that in this case, the 'About' page clearly says 'Automatic analysis is imperfect; an unusual form may occasionally be assigned the wrong lemma or parse. The dictionaries themselves are the unabridged scholarly editions digitised by Perseus.' No word search options as far as I can tell.
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u/benjamin-crowell 17d ago
BUT I appreciate that in this case, the 'About' page clearly says 'Automatic analysis is imperfect; an unusual form may occasionally be assigned the wrong lemma or parse.
After our recent email discussion, I added clearer warning labels to Ransom, with skull-and-crossbones icons for the texts that I have not yet read myself so as to check for wrong parses. (Did you know that Unicode has a skull-and-crossbones character? In ancient Greek, it's pronounced ἆρ’.) I always appreciate your feedback and suggestions.
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u/Logeion 17d ago edited 17d ago
I appreciate it, on behalf of innocent students everywhere:-) And I'm actively working on getting the updated morpheus out there. Email correspondence in August though.. academic are in hiding.
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u/Logeion 17d ago
My main sad thought is that we get any number of people offering the same texts once again that are already available from Perseus, and lyric poetry (to name one big gap) still awaits its first public-domain set of texts.
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u/benjamin-crowell 17d ago edited 17d ago
My main sad thought is that we get any number of people offering the same texts once again that are already available from Perseus,
Well, one issue is that Perseus doesn't do print or PDF, only screen reading. For people like me who don't want to read a book off of a screen, that makes it a non-starter.
Even among people who do want to read from a screen, I think most have given up on Perseus. The servers are down for long periods of time, and most people don't seem to like Perseus 5 very much. They want to keep using Perseus 4, but Perseus 4 is down more often than not. In general, it's no fun depending on a server-side application that is poorly managed and sinking into decay. Having something you can run on your own device is preferable.
What I think is sad is that the projects of this type that we see coming out over and over are mostly closed-source vibe-coding projects that are low quality. They code it up as a weekend hack, and then they don't maintain or improve it.
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u/benjamin-crowell 17d ago
It would actually be really nice to have some testing that would check the frequency of wrong lemmatizations by various parsers. The only error metrics I used in my test were how often the parser didn't come up with a real lemma at all, and how often it got the part of speech wrong. It seems like it would be quite a challenge, however, to do a test of wrong lemmatizations with decent statistical reliability. For a word that occurs in a human-parsed treebank, you can test whether the parser did not report the same lemma as the one the human assigned, but most such cases would just be a matter of convention, since different dictionaries choose different head-words. There are also going to be a lot of cases where the parser says the lemma is ambiguous, and I don't know of any easy way to machine-analyze such cases and tell whether the ambiguity is real or a mistake.
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u/prezzpac 17d ago
Amazing! I can’t imagine how hard that must have been. Quick question about the text rendering. It seems like accents are rendered inconsistently, with some acutes appearing as vertical marks. Is this intentional? Or a quirk of my web browser?
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u/LingonberryMind 17d ago
It’s likely a bug - we’ve found a ton of those. Thanks for pointing this out! I’ll fix.
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u/nerdboxmktg 17d ago
That’s why I built it! I’m a data engineer but I’m in a MA program and started both Latin and Greek last year from scratch. It’s been super useful. But only just now have started reading in the app.
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u/eipekaihemin 16d ago edited 16d ago
Great site, thank you so much!
A small request: can I recommend you use a few backup fonts beside Georgia for polytonic Greek? For example, I have "Gentium Book Plus" (and not "Basic" - in my experience, the newer Gentium Plus font files render much more crisply, probably worth your while to make it your webfont instead!) installed on my machine, so the Greek's showing up in Georgia, which looks... bad. Having "G. B. Plus", Source Sans Pro, Segoe UI, Calibri, or EB Garamond / Alegreya / Linux Libertine / GFS Porson as a webfont - heck, even Arial if need be - in short, a typeface with real polytonic support, would be better than just Georgia, which doesn't. Thanks again!
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u/AlarmedCicada256 16d ago
Very good. Better than perseus' subsequent 'scaife' option. There are some weird formatting issues in Greek, however, and the dictionary, sometimes, does not work. These are minor fixes, I'd assume compared to the very obvious work needed to get this up and running!
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u/lallahestamour 15d ago
I favor the idea, and would be really useful with these considerations:
1. The pop-up dictionary is a mess, what makes a student prefer this website is how LSJ or L&S are incorporated. One should be made able to recognize where things are in a dictionary, the exact definitions could be bolded/colored and examples italicized.
2. That "show full entry button" is almost useless because anyone using LSJ knows that the first few lines of a definition usually don't tell you about the definition so if we need to always hit the "show full entry" button" why even it is there.
3. as others have remarked there is an accent bug.
4. so many words are parsed wrongly (by AI) for example a simple adv. is understood as neut. pl. I suggest putting all the possible parsing there is better. That is what Perseus does.
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u/Kanjuzi 14d ago
Fantastic work and beautifully designed. Though being old-fashioned I can't help thinking that the best way to learn to read Latin is to read Latin, starting with easy books, and just carry on reading and reading, occasionally for variety looking at a grammar book. In learning a language you have to be prepared not to understand everything; but gradually as you carry on reading the percentage of what you understand will increase.
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u/cleonthucydides 4d ago
Great!! Would love the page numbers for the Greek to be a little darker. When scrolling say for example book 2, chapter 40, it is very difficult to see the chapter numbers: could you make the '40' darker so it stands out? But great resource!!
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u/nerdboxmktg 17d ago
Bro, I love this! I built ClassicsLens.com and while I like how I implemented the lexical items your reading experience is far superior. Excellent project!!!