Leitworte in Buber and Rosenzweig
The other day, I gave a lightning talk at the ACH 2023 conference, about some work in the Stern NLP Lab.
Here is the abstract:
Leitwort Discernment in Buber and Rosenzweig's Bible Translation
A Leitwort (“leading word”) is a word or word-root deliberately repeated as a literary technique, and has been investigated as a phenomenon in the Hebrew Bible. In prior work, we’ve investigated ways of neutrally detecting the presence of a Leitwort in a passage, based on a certain number of repetitions densely within a given text-span and a tf-idf score exceeding a given threshold, comparing our results to those of the scholar, Umberto Cassuto (1883-1951) [1]. A competing definition of Leitworte is adopted by the scholars Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, in their Biblical translation [2], where any repetition (even not sevenfold) is meaningful. They utilize the same German word or root in order to preserve repeated Leitworte. Programmatically using GPT-4, we identify shared words with shared etymologies. We then employ similar techniques as before to find repeated German words, consider their tf-idf scores, and compare against our prior Cassuto-inspired approach.
[1] See Moskowitz et al., Leitwort Detection, Quantification and Discernment https://aiucd2020.unicatt.it/aiucd-Moskowitz_et_al.pdf
[2] Available digitally at Libor Divis’ website, for SOB, the Online Study Bible
Here is a PDF of my slides from the talk.
