Over the Summer I participated in the Ancient Language Processing workshop in Varna. The workshop focuses on using computational linguistics to explore ancient language corpora.
I wrote a paper with Aleksi Sahala where we used word embeddings to find words in a Neo-Assyrian corpus that had a similar usage profile to words relating to the body. The body words that had a usage profile similar to emotion words should share a semantic field.
We found that of the 22 body words we examined, only the word for ‘liver’ (kabattu) had a clear emotional field.
You can find the paper, as well as the others presented at the workshop, here.
Ellie Bennett 