Towards Named-Entity and Coreference Annotation of the Hebrew Bible

AbstractNamed-entity annotation refers to the process of specifying what real-world (or, at least, external-to-the-text) entities various names and descriptions within a text refer to. Coreference annotation, meanwhile, specifies what context-dependent words or phrases, such as pronouns refer to. This paper describes an ongoing project to apply both of these to the Hebrew Bible, so far covering most of the book of Genesis, fully marking every person, place, object, and point in time which occurs in the text. The annotation process and possible future uses for the data are covered, along with the challenges involved in applying existing annotation guidelines to the Hebrew text.