Isnad Disambiguation
December 2022
Diambiguating scholars using graphs of tradional citations in Arabic manuscripts
Isnads are a traditional form of Arabic citation found in many manuscripts. Unlike modern, Western-style citations, isnads contain the full chain of transmission back to whomever is considered the original source. As a result, they are of immense interest to historians studying scholarly networks. Unfortunately, many scholars have similar names and disambiguating individuals in the reference chain is a time consuming manual task. Building very directly off the work of Ryan Muther, who was kind enough to share her code and time, my partner and I evaluated the effectiveness of a couple different approaches to the disambiguation task. In particular, we looked at contrastive embeddings and social features based on the similarity of isnad graphs.
Our code and final presentation can be found here.
Topics
- Digital Humanities
- Networks
- Word embeddings
Technologies Used
- NetworkX
- Torch
- BERT
Challenges & Learnings
This was the first big technical project of my master’s. We were building off and comparing to published work from the folks at KITAB, so the foundation was really well laid, but ultimately our original idea of applying graph methods, just didn’t work particularly well. We brought in contrastive, surface-form embeddings mostly as a supplement to the graph-based features, but it turned that approach worked way better on its own than mixed with the graph components.