Collatinus

A swiss-knife for Latin

Abstract

Created by Yves Ouvrard, Collatinus is a lemmatizer and a morphological analyzer for Latin. Its initial aim was to help teachers prepare texts together with their vocabulary list, and to assist beginners in reading authentic Latin texts independently. In addition to the short translation proposed, Collatinus allows users to consult dictionaries, both digital and image-based, in order to access full lexical information. Collatinus relies on a lexical base of more than 80,000 lemmas and on tables of word-endings. The lexical base includes a short translation of the lemmas, mainly in English and in French. Collatinus’ ability to split an inflected form in its stem and ending enables it to provide its full morphological analysis. As the quantities of each syllable are given in its databases, Collatinus is also able to scan texts metrically or to indicate accentuation. Several external tools have been developed to extend these core possibilities. More recently, Collatinus has been coupled to AI techniques (Latin-BERT) to choose the more appropriate lemmatization and analysis for each word in context. The AI model was trained on the annotated LASLA corpus, and the resulting tagger produces output files in the same APN format used by LASLA.