Interactive textbook of Ancien Greek in Chinese

The project

With Zeng Yi (曾怡) , I co-authored a textbook of ancient Greek in Mandarin. From three chapters of this textbook, I produced a natively accessible, enriched and interactive ePub3.3, as part of a dissertation supervised by Fabien Torre and Karolina Suchecka, at the Université de Lille.

1. Converting into XML

The first step of the process consisted in:

• Getting the flat XML from the styled .odt files
• Modifying and refining the markup of the flat XML
  • XSLT
• Adding a first level of linguistic markup with algorithms
  • XSLT
• Extracting a glossary based on the word list of each chapter
  • XSLT

2. Enriching the files with NLP tools

The second step consisted in enriching the resulting XML files with Natural Language Processing tools [NLP].

• With the Perseus module from the Stanza API, I added:
  • python3
  • an analysis in parts of speech (noun, verb, adjective…)
  • a morphological analysis (indicative present active…)
  • an analysis in universal dependencies (that is, a syntax analysis)
• Connect each word to the glossary to show its meanings or its translations.
  • XSLT

3. Making the ePub and building a user interface

All that remained was to…

• Make the born accessible ePub3.3
  • XSLT
• Build a user interface to view the results of the NLP processing as optional hints
  • JavaScript
• Embed this interface into the ePub