Utilizing phonetic similarity for cross-source and cross-language toponym matching: a benchmark and prototype.
The writings of one ancient civilization often overlap in time and space with others. Many of these sources comprise unstructured text in ancient languages, causing scholars studying these civilizations to be siloed, often relying on sources in specific languages. Most recent efforts to extract stru...
| Published in: | Language Resources & Evaluation Vol. 59; no. 3; pp. 2427 - 2452 |
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| Main Authors: | , , , , , |
| Format: | Article |
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Springer Nature
Sep2025
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | View this record in EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=hlh&AN=186909071&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: hlh uiTerm: 186909071 longDbName: Humanities International Complete uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 1574020X 179V jtl: Language Resources & Evaluation issn: 1574020X maglogo: N pubinfo: dt: Sep2025 vid: 59 iid: 3 pid: 237 pub: Springer Nature artinfo: ui: 186909071 10.1007/s10579-025-09812-9 ppf: 2427 ppct: 25 formats: fmt: – @attributes: type: T – @attributes: type: P size: 2MB tig: atl: Utilizing phonetic similarity for cross-source and cross-language toponym matching: a benchmark and prototype. aug: au: Sagi, Tomer Zaga, Moran Rusinek, Sinai Fekete, Marcell R. Bjerva, Johannes Hose, Katja affil: https://ror.org/04m5j1k67 Department of Computer Science, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark https://ror.org/02f009v59 e-Lijah Lab, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel https://ror.org/04d836q62 Institute of Logic and Computation, TU Wien, Vienna, Austria su: Hebrew language Arabic language Transliteration Geographic names Bilingualism Phonology Historical source material sug: subj: Hebrew language Arabic language Transliteration Geographic names Bilingualism Phonology Historical source material keyword: Communication and Culture Linguistics Grapheme to phoneme Language Multi-lingual Toponym matching ab: The writings of one ancient civilization often overlap in time and space with others. Many of these sources comprise unstructured text in ancient languages, causing scholars studying these civilizations to be siloed, often relying on sources in specific languages. Most recent efforts to extract structured information from historical scripts into place (toponym) and people databases (prospographies) have followed this pattern, focusing on one civilization and selected sources. The path to creating a common database runs through aligning names or toponyms between sources from disparate languages utilizing different scripts. Existing multi-lingual orthographic (string-based) comparison often relies on transliteration to a common script (Latin/English). Transliteration often creates multiple options and even more confusion. However, when integrating sources that overlap in space and time, the languages often share a common phonetic background. This commonality may prove beneficial. In this work, we present a benchmark for comparing toponyms from two linguistically and culturally related languages, namely Hebrew and Arabic. We provide a benchmark comprised of a set of dataset pairs created from historical sources written in Medieval variants of these languages, later historical Gazetteers and a modern dataset curated from Wikidata. We empirically evaluate several toponym comparison approaches over the benchmark: transliteration to a common script, direct transliteration, and phonetic comparison using a common phonetic representation. We discuss the results and the limitations of the various methods and outline future work. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Article src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: Y custom: Language Resources & Evaluation is a copyright of Springer, 2025. All Rights Reserved. item: Language Resources & Evaluation holder: Springer Nature dt: @attributes: year: 2025 holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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