Institute for Research in the Humanities

Thomas Leek

Position title: Universities of Wisconsin Fellow (2024-2025)

Address:
Associate Professor, Department of World Languages and Literatures, UW–Stevens Point

This is a photograph of a man wearing glasses. From the neck up.

Aligning Vectorized Ancient Language Corpora: Towards a Translingual Search Function

Natural Language Processing (NLP) enables machine analysis of human languages for purposes such as search, translation, text matching, and automated text generation. This project aligns vectorized language corpora of Latin and Middle High German to test various approaches for accurate alignments. The goal is to establish translingual search functionality by identifying semantic textual similarity through machine learning. Results of test cases on pre-modern texts will exemplify studies on the infusion of Latin culture into the Germanic language cultural zone with broader applicability to the further study of ancient and medieval cultural transmission, for example between Greek, Arabic, and Latin.

Thomas Leek completed his PhD in German Medieval Studies at the University of Minnesota. His research interests include medieval folklore and historical linguistics. He has been professor of German at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point since 2009.