Datasets:

Nerthus-Project
/

Generated_OE_Gregory_Dialogues_Text_and_Evaluation

license: cc-by-4.0
language:
  - ang
  - en
task_categories:
  - text-generation
pretty_name: 'Generated Old English Gregory’s Dialogues: Text and Evaluation'
size_categories:
  - 1K<n<10K
tags:
  - old-english
  - historical-languages
  - text-generation
  - evaluation
  - universal-dependencies
  - word-embeddings
  - nerthus-project
configs:
  - config_name: default
    data_files:
      - split: train
        path: >-
          gregory-generated-old-english/data/gregory_dialogues_generated_oe.parquet
dataset_info:
  config_name: default
  features:
    - name: sentence_code
      dtype: string
    - name: generated_oe
      dtype: string
    - name: generated_en
      dtype: string
  splits:
    - name: train
      num_bytes: 1493253
      num_examples: 4217
  download_size: 547030
  dataset_size: 1493253

Generated Old English Gregory's Dialogues (variatio)

A complete, machine-generated Old English variatio of the Old English Dialogues of Gregory the Great (Waerferth's translation), produced on 19 July 2026, together with the full generation and evaluation apparatus: prompt, constraint lexicon scripts, validator, dependency parses, word embeddings, and all quantitative evaluation results.

The project is described in:

Martin Arista, J., & Nunez, M. Evaluating Generated Old English Text: A Dependency-Based Method Built on the Old English Dependency Treebank and Pre-Trained Word Embeddings. (Under review.)

Authors: Javier Martin Arista (Universidad de La Rioja) and Matias Nunez (INIBIOMA-CONICET).

What this is

The generated text is a sentence-by-sentence rewriting of the whole work in the same language and register: one generated Old English sentence for each of the 4,217 source sentences (114,451 running tokens), each with its own literal Modern English translation. The exercise is the classical variatio: same content, same style, different wording.

The generator was Claude Fable 5 (Anthropic), reached through the Anthropic Messages API. The source was divided into 71 batches of about sixty sentences. Four constraints were enforced during generation, not checked afterwards: every token had to belong to a 227,899-form lexicon of attested Old English surface forms; no diacritics were allowed; each line had to stay between 0.8 and 1.25 times the length of its source; and no line could exceed a token-set Jaccard similarity of 0.7 with its source. A validator script rejected offending lines and generation continued until all 4,217 lines passed.

Repository structure

gregory-generated-old-english/data/gregory_dialogues_generated_oe.parquet   the generated text (4,217 rows, 3 columns)
gregory-generated-old-english/data/gregory_dialogues_generated_oe.tsv       the same data as tab-separated text
gregory-generated-old-english/generation/PROMPT.md                      the generation instructions
gregory-generated-old-english/generation/build_lexicon.py               compiles the allowed-forms lexicon
gregory-generated-old-english/generation/validate_batch.py              the four-check validator
gregory-generated-old-english/generation/assemble_final.py              assembles validated batches
gregory-generated-old-english/evaluation/scripts/parse_new_text.py      parses the generated text (Stanza, ang)
gregory-generated-old-english/evaluation/scripts/bootstrap_cis.py       bootstrap confidence intervals (1,000 replicates)
gregory-generated-old-english/evaluation/scripts/evaluate_native_pt_embeddings.py   embedding-space comparison
gregory-generated-old-english/evaluation/results/*.json                 all quantitative results (9 files)
gregory-generated-old-english/parses/regenerated.conllu                 dependency parse of the generated text (UD)
gregory-generated-old-english/embeddings/ang_embeddings.pt              Old English word embeddings (57,186 x 100)

Data fields

The dataset is loaded from gregory-generated-old-english/data/gregory_dialogues_generated_oe.parquet (this is the file the Hub's dataset viewer reads); gregory-generated-old-english/data/gregory_dialogues_generated_oe.tsv carries the same rows as UTF-8 tab-separated text with a header line. The fields are:

Field	Description
`sentence_code`	DOEC-style sentence identifier, e.g. `[GD 1 (C) 000100 (1.11.3)]`
`generated_oe`	the generated Old English sentence
`generated_en`	a literal Modern English translation of the generated sentence

Example row:

[GD 1 (C) 000100 (1.11.3)]	Geo waes in thaere maegthe Samni sumes welegan mannes ham...	Long ago there was in the province of Samni a wealthy man's homestead...

(The actual file uses the Old English characters thorn, eth and ash; they are shown transliterated in this example only.)

The sentence codes preserve the alignment with the source: each row answers exactly one sentence of the original Dialogues, so the generated text can be re-aligned with any copy of the original obtained from the sources listed below.

Evaluation summary

The text was evaluated against two references: the original Old English Dialogues (fidelity to the source) and the Dictionary of Old English Corpus (compatibility with the language at large). Full details are in the paper; the component scores are:

Component	Score
A (lexical attestation)	0.99997
W (word-embedding geometry)	0.99889
F (frequency profile)	0.99191
S (syntactic structure)	0.99191
I (independence from source)	0.99761
C (character-level profile)	0.98189
L (length fidelity)	0.97550
G (geometric mean)	0.9911 (95% CI [0.9906, 0.9916])

All figures can be recomputed from gregory-generated-old-english/evaluation/results/ and the scripts provided. The parse in gregory-generated-old-english/parses/regenerated.conllu was produced with the same Stanza ang pipeline used for the reference parses, trained on the Old English Dependency Treebank (OEDT).

Embeddings

gregory-generated-old-english/embeddings/ang_embeddings.pt contains the 100-dimensional Old English word embeddings used in the evaluation (57,186 vocabulary items). Row i corresponds to token id2unit[i+5] of the Stanza ang pretrain nerthus.pt, with which the matrix is identical from row 5 onward; the mapping is verified in gregory-generated-old-english/evaluation/scripts/evaluate_native_pt_embeddings.py.

Previously published embeddings and models of the Nerthus Project are available at:

https://huggingface.co/Nerthus-Project
https://stanfordnlp.github.io/stanza/ner_models.html (Stanza models for Old English, ang)

What is not included, and where to find it

The original Old English text. The original Dialogues is not distributed here. The edition used in the project is:

Hecht, H. (Ed.). (1900-1907). Bischof Waerferths von Worcester Uebersetzung der Dialoge Gregors des Grossen (Bibliothek der angelsaechsischen Prosa 5). Georg H. Wigand.

The electronic text is part of the Dictionary of Old English Corpus (DOEC), available through the Oxford Text Archive at http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12024/2488. For the corpus and its licensing, see the Dictionary of Old English Project: https://doe.artsci.utoronto.ca/

The Dictionary of Old English Corpus (DOEC). Used as the broad historical baseline of the evaluation; obtain it from the Oxford Text Archive (link above) or from the Dictionary of Old English Project.

Old English dictionaries. The dictionaries used to compile the lexical resources of the project cannot be redistributed. They can be obtained from:

Bosworth-Toller, An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary - digital edition: https://bosworthtoller.com/
Bosworth-Toller - scanned copies for download: https://archive.org/details/anglosaxondictio00boswuoft and the Germanic Lexicon Project: http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/germanic/oe_bosworthtoller_about.html
Clark Hall, A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary: https://archive.org/details/conciseanglosaxo00hall
Sweet, The Student's Dictionary of Anglo-Saxon: https://archive.org/details/studentsdictiona00sweeuoft
Dictionary of Old English (A to Le), University of Toronto: https://doe.artsci.utoronto.ca/

Project-internal lexical resources. The lemma-and-inflection dictionary (37,522 lemmas, 149,286 attested inflectional forms), the orthographic variant dictionary (162,253 attested spelling variants), and the compiled allowed-forms lexicon derived from them are based on third-party sources and are not released here. They are available under conditions: requests should be addressed to javier.martin@unirioja.es.

Citation

If you use this dataset, please cite:

@misc{gregory-generated-oe-2026,
  title     = {Generated Old English Gregory's Dialogues (variatio)},
  author    = {Mart{\'i}n Arista, Javier and N{\'u}{\~n}ez, Mat{\'i}as},
  year      = {2026},
  publisher = {Hugging Face},
  note      = {Universidad de La Rioja / INIBIOMA-CONICET}
}