Hello Aaron, It's great to hear from Harvard University, and your encouragement and positive feedback are kindly received. From what I understand, you are interesting in diagramming verses from the Torah, I would presume in Hebrew, given that you indicated that you are a researcher in Semitic linguistics?
The diagrams displayed on the Quranic Arabic Corpus website are a visualization of traditional Arabic syntax (i'rab) based on dependency grammar with morphological segmentation. This project is part of wider language research being conducted at the School of Computing, University of Leeds. Hence, although the project is largely linguistic in nature, there is a lot of focus on computation - the infrastructure behind the website is all custom Java programming (using the Java 2D drawing API). It is possible that at a later stage in the future the tools and proprietary applications used to develop the linguistic annotation will be made more reusable and user-friendly for other research. At the moment though, the focus of the project is on improving the accuracy of the annotation for students and researchers, and so I’m afraid that right now there isn’t anything straight forward you can download to generate these dependency graphs yourself in another language. However, having said that, I would be more than happy to help out. It would be great to get another paper citation for the Quranic Arabic Corpus, especially on a related project involving another religious text (the Torah). It should be quite straightforward to rework the software we've developed to produce a few custom dependency graphs (a day's work I would imagine). As long as there are only a dozen or so morphological/depedency graphs that you need, this would be feasible. If you send me an explanation - or a simple mock up in a word processor - of what you need, I can look into it for you and see if those graphs can be produced by the software we have developed. It would also be be useful to know if there is a free good font that can be downloaded that you intend to use for the diagrams. My apologies for not being able to point you to something more user-friendly, i.e. tool that you can easily download and reuse. Hopefully this will be the case sometime in the future, but for now the annotation diagramming tool is custom to this project, and not easily adapted without detailed knowledge of the Java programming language and graph drawing algorithms. I would still be happy to help you produce a few diagrams for you though, especially if it demonstrates academically that the infrastructure we have developed can in principle be adapted to other languages and related projects. Kind Regards, -- Kais Dukes Language Research Group School of Computing University of Leeds http://corpus.quran.com - The Quranic Arabic Corpus [email protected] - Computational Quranic Arabic discussion list > ------------------------------------------- > From: [email protected] on behalf of Aaron > Wenner[SMTP:[email protected]] > Sent: Thursday, January 28, 2010 9:17:13 AM > Subject: Dependency Graph Visualization > Auto forwarded by a Rule > > I'm extremely impressed with the Qur'an project. Your implementation of > Qur'anic grammar alongside the text and the resulting interlinear format will > be a major tool for researchers and instructors everywhere. > > I'm writing because I'm interested in how you're generating visualizations > for your dependency graphs. I'm a researcher in semitic linguistics, and I > would love to use your approach in diagraming Torah verses. I'm in the > process of compiling and annotating verses from each of the hypothesized > redactors of the biblical corpus (J,P,E, etc) in order to compare them > morphologically, and the types of visualizations you're generating would be > wonderful to use in my ultimate presentation. Is this a proprietary tool > you've developed, or are you willing to share it with other researchers? > > It should go without saying that you would receive full citation in my work. > > Thanks for your time, > Aaron Wenner
