March 3, 2026Open Access

Sense-Based Annotation of Geographical Nouns in Ancient Greek and Latin:A Diachronic Study with LLMs

Key Points

City-related concepts are most frequently expressed in both Latin and Ancient Greek, with notable differences in focus.
Latin shows clearer evidence of semantic change over time, such as civitas shifting from 'citizenship' to 'city'.
The investigation employed Large Language Models for Word Sense Disambiguation across a diachronically diverse corpus.
The findings allow for meaningful cross-linguistic analysis of spatial semantics throughout history.

Abstract

This paper investigates the lexicalisation of geographical nouns in Latin and Ancient Greek using a diachronically and generically diverse corpus (8th cent. BCE – 2nd cent. CE) and Large Language Models for Word Sense Disambiguation. We focus on two main aspects: the onoma- siological question of which words encode core geographical concepts, and the semasiological distribution of senses across lemmas. Across both languages, city-related concepts are the most frequently expressed, but Greek shows a stronger focus on maritime terms, whereas Latin favours concepts related to land. Semasiologically, Latin shows clearer evidence of semantic change over time (e.g., civitas ‘citizenship’ → ‘city’, aequor ‘flat surface’ → ‘sea’), while Greek displays more gradual or distributed shifts. These results show that computational annotation enables cross-linguistic and diachronic analysis of spatial semantics, allowing us to compare the frequency of concepts across languages, genres, and periods, and to track when semantic change occurs and how core concepts evolve over time.

Sense-Based Annotation of Geographical Nouns in Ancient Greek and Latin:A Diachronic Study with LLMs

Key Points

Abstract

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