MOLOR

Morphologically Linked Old Irish Resource

MOLOR — Morphologically Linked Old Irish Resource — has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe scientific research initiative under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA), grant agreement No 101106220. The project is based at the Centro Interdisciplinare di Ricerche per la Computerizzazione dei Segni dell’Espressione (CIRCSE), at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy. The project will run from 1 October 2023 until 30 September 2025 and aims to make distributed lexical resources for Old Irish (600–900CE) interact by using state-of-the-art data models and lexicographic standards based on the Linguistic Linked Open Data (LLOD) principles.

THE PROJECT

MOLOR will represent a novel linked lexico-morphological framework for Old Irish (600–900CE) in the spirit of Linguistic Linked Open Data (LLOD). The project employs state-of-the-art ontologies for modelling lexical resources for this purpose, primarily including Lexicon Model for Ontologies (OntoLex-Lemon) and the framework developed as part of the Linking Latin (LiLa) project. On the basis of the 8th-century Old Irish Würzburg glosses, MOLOR will fully exploit a set of existing — both textual and lexical — resources. As part of the project, the first steps will be made in linking the text with an inflectional lexicon, which is in development.

The Würzburg glosses constitute one of the largest contemporary bodies of Old Irish text, as such being of great historical and linguistic significance, yet no high-quality and state-of-the-art morphological resource exists for this text; MOLOR will make one of the most important Old Irish texts more accessible for the first time. MOLOR adheres to a state-of-the-art and standard lexicographic data model (OntoLex-Lemon), developed according to the FAIR principles to increase findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reproducibility. The integration of resources will benefit many different stakeholders, including lexicographers, philologists, and students, who currently work with inadequate and fragmented resources for a language with a highly complex morphology and an inconsistent and opaque orthography.

MOLOR is not only expected to lead to a novel standard in resource creation and interlinking for Old Irish (and conceivably for the medieval language more broadly), but it will also substantially contribute to and improve language-independent lexicographic data formats and ontologies, as such being applicable to any language and any domain. The present focus is on the development of a major output of the project: an Old Irish Lemma Bank, inspired by the one created for Latin. Being a central hub and interface, this resource is envisaged to be a vital component in the incipient knowledge base of interlinked Old Irish resources.

TEAM

The MOLOR team consists of:

•     Theodorus Fransen, MSCA Research Fellow;

•     Marco C. Passarotti, Project Supervisor.

The team works in a lively and international research centre, CIRCSE, based at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, where the main research aim is centred on creating computational linguistic resources for Latin. Their principal project is the Index Thomisticus Treebank.