--- 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 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: ```bibtex @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} } ``` ## Contact Javier Martin Arista, Universidad de La Rioja: javier.martin@unirioja.es ---