Computational Discovery of Chiasmus in Ancient Religious Text

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: McGovern, Hope, Sirin, Hale, Lippincott, Tom
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author McGovern, Hope
Sirin, Hale
Lippincott, Tom
author_facet McGovern, Hope
Sirin, Hale
Lippincott, Tom
contents Chiasmus, a debated literary device in Biblical texts, has captivated mystics while sparking ongoing scholarly discussion. In this paper, we introduce the first computational approach to systematically detect chiasmus within Biblical passages. Our method leverages neural embeddings to capture lexical and semantic patterns associated with chiasmus, applied at multiple levels of textual granularity (half-verses, verses). We also involve expert annotators to review a subset of the detected patterns. Despite its computational efficiency, our method achieves robust results, with high inter-annotator agreement and system precision@k of 0.80 at the verse level and 0.60 at the half-verse level. We further provide a qualitative analysis of the distribution of detected chiasmi, along with selected examples that highlight the effectiveness of our approach.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_10739
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Computational Discovery of Chiasmus in Ancient Religious Text
McGovern, Hope
Sirin, Hale
Lippincott, Tom
Computation and Language
Chiasmus, a debated literary device in Biblical texts, has captivated mystics while sparking ongoing scholarly discussion. In this paper, we introduce the first computational approach to systematically detect chiasmus within Biblical passages. Our method leverages neural embeddings to capture lexical and semantic patterns associated with chiasmus, applied at multiple levels of textual granularity (half-verses, verses). We also involve expert annotators to review a subset of the detected patterns. Despite its computational efficiency, our method achieves robust results, with high inter-annotator agreement and system precision@k of 0.80 at the verse level and 0.60 at the half-verse level. We further provide a qualitative analysis of the distribution of detected chiasmi, along with selected examples that highlight the effectiveness of our approach.
title Computational Discovery of Chiasmus in Ancient Religious Text
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.10739