MichaelWittweiler/latin-intertextuality-modification-test-cases

Latin Intertextuality Test Cases (Controlled Modifications)

This repository provides a small qualitative dataset of Latin sentence pairs used to study how sentence-embedding similarity reacts to controlled modifications of a query sentence in intertextual links (literal quotation, paraphrase, allusion).

The dataset contains 11 base cases, each paired with 12 modified variants of the query sentence (plus one random-control pairing), for a total of 143 rows.

Contents

• test_cases.csv — the test cases and all controlled query modifications (no cosine similarities included)

Intended use

The dataset is designed for qualitative / diagnostic evaluation of embedding-based similarity in Latin intertextuality detection, including:

• reductions to specific word material (content words / function words / citation-only),
• controlled morphological variation (case, tense, mood, number),
• semantic(-syntactic) variation (paraphrase, limited reordering),
• comparison against a random corpus sentence (control).

Data format

The CSV has 6 columns:

• case_id
  Identifier for the row. The numeric part denotes the base case (1–11). Some rows may append a suffix (e.g., 1a, 1b) but the definitive variant type is given by operation_description.

• query_id
  Citation identifier for the later text (the reusing passage), e.g., hier. epist. 84.3.5.3.

• source_id
  Citation identifier for the earlier text (the reused source), e.g., verg. aen. 11.282.1.

• original
  The source sentence (classical author).
  Note: in the random_corpus_sample condition, this field contains a random sentence sampled from the corpus.

• paraphrased
  The query sentence (late antique author), in its original or modified form.

• operation_description
  The modification applied to the query (or the control condition). Each base case appears once for each of the following operations:

  • original — unmodified query and source
  • reduction_to_content_words — query reduced to content words only
  • reduction_to_function_words — query reduced to function words only
  • reduction_to_citation — query reduced to citation-relevant material
  • morph_number — controlled number changes
  • morph_tenses — controlled tense changes
  • morph_moods — controlled mood changes
  • morph_cases — controlled case changes
  • morph_all — combination of multiple morphological changes
  • paraphrase_1 — mild paraphrase (near-synonym substitutions)
  • paraphrase_2 — stronger paraphrase (additional substitutions)
  • paraphrase_2_reorder — paraphrase plus local reordering
  • random_corpus_sample — query paired with a random corpus sentence (control)

Notes on the text

• Text is provided as Latin strings and may preserve orthography and punctuation from the working corpus.
• Some modified variants are intentionally not fully grammatical; they are constructed to isolate the effect of minimal controlled changes.
• This dataset contains Latin excerpts only and does not include modern translations.
• The Latin text were drawn from freely accessible editions, downloaded from Corpus Corporum, the Tesserae Project and the OpenGreekandLatin Project: Virgil: Greenough 1900, Lucretius: Martin 1934, Jerome letters: Hilberg 1910, other works: Patrologia Latina 1945.