Elaborazione del linguaggio naturale (NLP) in Ebraico: il caso dell'analisi linguistica automatica applicata all'ebraico mishnaico del Talmud

The paper briefly introduces the field of Digital Humanities (i.e. the intersection of digital technologies and disciplines of humanities) and provides some examples of digital applications in the area of jewish studies. The Progetto Traduzione Talmud Babilonese (PTTB) project, aimed at producing the first complete Italian translation of the Babylonian Talmud, then will be presented. The translation is being carried out with the help of "Traduco", an innovative, collaborative, computer-assisted translation (CAT) tool developed at the Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale of Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (ILC-CNR) in Pisa. In particular, the paper will focus on what is automatic linguistic analysis, why it's being integrated in one of the components of "Traduco" and its application to the mishnaic language. Even if we are at the very beginning of the construction of the tool, this research activity have exposed all the peculiarities of the mishnaic language and the problems arising from the lacking of resources and tools for the processing of this language. Finally, we will show the two main use cases leveraging on the obtained analysis, namely the improvement of the automatic suggestions component and the linguistic based querying of the annotated talmudic corpus.