README.md

---
license: cc-by-4.0
task_categories:
- text-retrieval
language:
- la
multilinguality:
- monolingual
size_categories:
- 10K<n<100K
pretty_name: Latin Epic Intertextuality Retrieval
tags:
- poetry
- latin
- classical
- epic
- intertextuality
- retrieval
- mteb
- poetrymteb
- embedding-evaluation
annotations_creators:
- expert-generated
source_datasets:
- QuantitativeCriticismLab/NAACL-HLT-2021-Latin-Intertextuality
configs:
- config_name: corpus
  data_files:
  - split: test
    path: corpus/test-*
- config_name: queries
  data_files:
  - split: test
    path: queries/test-*
- config_name: qrels
  data_files:
  - split: test
    path: qrels/test-*
  default: true
dataset_info:
- config_name: corpus
  features:
  - name: id
    dtype: string
  - name: text
    dtype: string
  - name: author
    dtype: string
  - name: work
    dtype: string
  - name: book
    dtype: int64
  - name: line
    dtype: int64
  - name: tess_index
    dtype: string
  splits:
  - name: test
    num_examples: 39675
- config_name: queries
  features:
  - name: id
    dtype: string
  - name: text
    dtype: string
  - name: vf_book
    dtype: int64
  - name: line_start
    dtype: int64
  - name: line_end
    dtype: int64
  - name: query_phrases
    dtype: string
  - name: n_parallels
    dtype: int64
  splits:
  - name: test
    num_examples: 482
- config_name: qrels
  features:
  - name: query-id
    dtype: string
  - name: corpus-id
    dtype: string
  - name: score
    dtype: float64
  splits:
  - name: test
    num_examples: 978
---

# Latin Epic Intertextuality Retrieval

BEIR-style **Retrieval** benchmark for **Latin epic intertextuality** under PoetryMTEB.

Given a passage from Valerius Flaccus, *Argonautica* Book 1, retrieve the corresponding verse line(s) in Vergil (*Aeneid*), Lucan (*Bellum Civile*), Ovid (*Metamorphoses*), or Statius (*Thebaid*) that traditional scholarship identifies as parallels.

Gold parallels: Burns et al., NAACL-HLT 2021 ([paper](https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.389/); [repo](https://github.com/QuantitativeCriticismLab/NAACL-HLT-2021-Latin-Intertextuality)), **945** curated pairs.

## Dataset Card

| Item | Description |
|------|-------------|
| **Dataset version** | `1.0.0` |
| **Task** | Retrieval (document ranking) |
| **Language** | Latin (`la`) |
| **Query** | VF *Argonautica* 1.x line span (`queries.text`) |
| **Corpus** | Line-level epic verses (Vergil / Lucan / Ovid / Statius) |
| **Relevance** | Scholar-curated parallels (`score=1`); multi-line targets → all lines marked relevant |
| **Splits** | **test only** (MTEB Retrieval) |
| **Size** | corpus=39675; queries=482; qrels=978 |
| **Avg. relevant docs / query** | 2.03 (min=1, max=10) |
| **License** | [CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) (packaging; classical texts are public domain) |
| **Evaluation metrics** | nDCG@10, MAP, Recall@k |

### Corpus author distribution (documents)

| author | work | #lines |
|--------|------|-------:|
| Ovid | Metamorphoses | 11995 |
| Vergil | Aeneid | 9896 |
| Statius | Thebaid | 9731 |
| Lucan | Bellum Civile | 8053 |

## Configs

### `corpus`

| Field | Type | Description |
|-------|------|-------------|
| `id` | string | `{author_key}-{book}-{line}` (e.g. `vergil-1-1`) |
| `text` | string | **Retrieval document** (Latin verse line) |
| `author` | string | Vergil / Lucan / Ovid / Statius |
| `work` | string | Work title |
| `book` | int64 | Book number |
| `line` | int64 | Line number |
| `tess_index` | string | Original Tesserae-style index |

### `queries`

| Field | Type | Description |
|-------|------|-------------|
| `id` | string | `vf-1-{start}-{end}` |
| `text` | string | **Retrieval query**: concatenated VF Book 1 lines |
| `vf_book` | int64 | Always `1` in this release |
| `line_start` / `line_end` | int64 | Inclusive VF line span |
| `query_phrases` | string | JSON list of lemma/phrase queries from the gold file |
| `n_parallels` | int64 | Number of gold parallels for this span |

### `qrels`

| Field | Type | Description |
|-------|------|-------------|
| `query-id` | string | Matches `queries.id` |
| `corpus-id` | string | Matches `corpus.id` |
| `score` | float64 | `1.0` for gold relevant lines |

## Construction method

1. Load Tesserae-format `.tess` line files for four target epics → `corpus`.
2. Load VF *Argonautica* Book 1 lines; group gold rows in `vf_intertext_dataset_1_0.csv` by `(VF Line Start, VF Line End)`.
3. Query text = concatenated VF lines in the span.
4. For each parallel, mark every target line in `[Intertext Line Start, End]` as relevant.
5. Deduplicate qrels per `(query-id, corpus-id)`.

## How to load

```python
from datasets import load_dataset

corpus = load_dataset("PoetryMTEB/LatinEpicIntertextualityRetrieval", "corpus")["test"]
queries = load_dataset("PoetryMTEB/LatinEpicIntertextualityRetrieval", "queries")["test"]
qrels = load_dataset("PoetryMTEB/LatinEpicIntertextualityRetrieval", "qrels")["test"]

print(queries[0]["id"], queries[0]["text"][:120])
print(corpus[0]["author"], corpus[0]["text"])
```

## Citation

```bibtex
@inproceedings{burns-etal-2021-profiling,
  title     = {Profiling of Intertextuality in {L}atin Literature Using Word Embeddings},
  author    = {Burns, Patrick J. and Brofos, James A. and Li, Kyle and Chaudhuri, Pramit and Dexter, Joseph P.},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of NAACL-HLT 2021},
  year      = {2021},
  pages     = {4900--4907},
  url       = {https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.389/}
}
```

Upstream: [https://github.com/QuantitativeCriticismLab/NAACL-HLT-2021-Latin-Intertextuality](https://github.com/QuantitativeCriticismLab/NAACL-HLT-2021-Latin-Intertextuality)  
Hub packaging: `PoetryMTEB/LatinEpicIntertextualityRetrieval` (v1.0.0)