From Networks to Named Entities and Back Again: Exploring Classical Arabic Isnād Networks
Document Type
Article
Department
Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations, London
Abstract
This paper explores new methods for disambiguating the identity of individuals in classical Arabic citations (isnāds) using a network-based approach. After training a model to extract name mentions from classical Arabic, we embed these mentions in vector space using fine-tuned BERT representations and use community detection to infer clusters of coreferent mentions. The best-performing clustering approach reduces error on the CoNLL metric by 30%. Then, as a case study, we examine the problem of determining the number of direct transmitters to Ibn ʿAsākir (d. 1176) in a set of isnāds taken from the 12th century historical text Taʾrīkh Madīnat Dimashq (TMD, History of Damascus), using our method to replicate human judgement.
Publication (Name of Journal)
Journal of Historical Network Research
DOI
https://doi.org/10.25517/jhnr.v8i1.135
Recommended Citation
Muther, R.,
Smith, D.,
Savant, S. B.
(2023). From Networks to Named Entities and Back Again: Exploring Classical Arabic Isnād Networks. Journal of Historical Network Research, 8(1), 1-20.
Available at:
https://ecommons.aku.edu/uk_ismc_faculty_publications/302
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.