Loci Similes: A Benchmark for Extracting Intertextualities in Latin Literature
cs.IR, cs.CL, cs.DL
Submitted: 2026-01-12
Updated: 2026-08-31
Code: https://github.com/tesserae/tesserae
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: Tracing connections between historical texts is an important part of intertextual research, enabling scholars to reconstruct the virtual library of a writer and identify the sources influencing their
Terminology
Abstract
Tracing connections between historical texts is an important part of intertextual research, enabling scholars to reconstruct the virtual library of a writer and identify the sources influencing their creative process. These intertextual links manifest in diverse forms, ranging from direct verbatim quotations to subtle allusions and paraphrases disguised by morphological variation. Language models offer a promising path forward due to their capability of capturing semantic similarity beyond lexical overlap. However, the development of new methods for this task is held back by the scarcity of standardized benchmarks and easy-to-use datasets. We address this gap by introducing Loci Similes, a benchmark for Latin intertextuality detection comprising a curated dataset of 176k text segments and 1,490 expert-verified parallels, including 945 labeled references from an existing dataset. Using this data, we establish baselines for retrieval and classification of intertextualities with both lexical methods and pretrained encoder language models.
Sources
- M3-Embedding: Multi-Linguality, Multi-Functionality, Multi-Granularity Text Embeddings Through Self-Knowledge Distillation
- Granite Embedding Models
- Latin BERT: A Contextual Language Model for Classical Philology
- Latin writing styles analysis with Machine Learning: New approach to old questions
- Mining Asymmetric Intertextuality
- mmBERT: A Modern Multilingual Encoder with Annealed Language Learning
- Reception Reader: Exploring Text Reuse in Early Modern British Publications
- Multilingual E5 Text Embeddings: A Technical Report
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