{"id":283,"date":"2024-04-14T08:35:46","date_gmt":"2024-04-14T08:35:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/presidentreport.biu.ac.il\/?p=283"},"modified":"2024-05-26T07:54:27","modified_gmt":"2024-05-26T07:54:27","slug":"cracking-the-hebrew-code","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/presidentreport.biu.ac.il\/index.php\/2024\/04\/14\/cracking-the-hebrew-code\/","title":{"rendered":"Cracking the Hebrew Code"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Prof. Avi Shmidman of The Joseph and Norman Berman Department of Literature of the Jewish People holds a manuscript from the Cairo Genizah containing a \u201cqerovah poem,\u201d or a poetic alternative to the Shmoneh Esreh, for the 10th of Tevet.<\/p> <\/div>\n<\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n

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The Faculty of Jewish Studies<\/h5> <\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n
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Cracking the Hebrew Code<\/h3> <\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n
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By building AI tools that can navigate the notoriously ambiguous Hebrew language, the linguist, computer scientist, and scholar of medieval Jewish texts Dr. Avi Shmidman is enabling new avenues of inquiry and new perspectives on Jewish life throughout history.\u00a0<\/h6> <\/div>\n<\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n
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The Right Man at the Right Time<\/h3>
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In 2015, when the field of digital humanities was just starting to take shape, \u201cuniversities were struggling to build teams that had all the component parts,\u201d recalls Dr. Avi Shmidman, a scholar of medieval Jewish poetry who had spent more than a decade building devices for the military avionics sector at the time. \u201cThe Jewish studies researchers wanted computer scientists to help them transcribe and search handwritten texts, but computer scientists insisted they first needed linguists to \u2018disambiguate\u2019 the Hebrew language\u201d\u2014which, explains Shmidman, suffers from \u201cextreme ambiguity\u201d on account of the lack of vowels, attached prefixes, and the absence of capital letters.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Fortunately, alongside his training in computer science, Shmidman had also previously pursued studies in linguistics. Joking that he was effectively all three team members in one, he seized the opportunity to do what he calls \u201cfoundational work\u201d: Namely, allow scholars to uncover trends, make new connections, and find fruitful new avenues of study within the corpus of Jewish texts.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the past,\u201d explains Shmidman, \u201cif a scholar wanted to find all the places where a certain halachic opinion was given, he would have to search through texts himself. There was no way to automate the process, because ensuring relevant results meant that the algorithms had to \u2018understand\u2019 the meaning of the words and structures in every instance.\u201d Now, however, Shmidman\u2019s algorithms can do just that, helping scholars trace back the history of a ruling, a prayer, or an idea, and see the many vicissitudes that shaped the version we have today. This is precisely the goal of the six-year, \u20ac10 million ERC synergy grant awarded jointly in 2022 to Shmidman and his partners at Sciences-Lettres University in Paris and Tel Aviv University, which is developing algorithms capable of extracting text from handwritten Hebrew manuscripts. In addition, the grant\u2019s partners are developing an algorithm for paleography, which can determine when a text was written by the handwritten letters\u2019 shape. Once these algorithms can transcribe, decipher, and catalogue all the ancient texts in the National Library of Israel, they can facilitate the automated searches that lead to new discoveries.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe path from building devices for military aircraft to digital tools that decipher Jewish texts is certainly unusual,\u201d concedes Shmidman. \u201cBut I like to think that in both cases, I\u2019ve helped the Jewish people to reach new heights.\u201d<\/p> <\/div>\n<\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n

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Together Again: Joining a Lost Manuscript<\/h6>\n

Usually, genizah researchers work with online images of fragments and their digitally calculated measurements, which enables the easy identification of parts of the same manuscript. In one instance, however, the digital measurements provided for a Jerusalem Genizah fragment were substantially narrower than those of a Cambridge fragment that Shmidman was certain had originated from the very same codex. Suspecting a mistake, Shmidman inspected the physical specimen (shown here). To his surprise, he found that the edge of the fragment had been folded back against the other side of the page. After carefully unfolding the flap with the archivists at the National Library of Israel, he discovered that its width precisely fit that of the Cambridge fragment; undeniably, these two fragments\u2014stored in two different collections, in two different parts of the world\u2014form one continuous prayer manuscript, now joined together again. His finding was published in Hebrew Union College Annual, a prestigious journal in the field of Jewish studies.<\/p> <\/div>\n<\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n\n

<\/a>\"image_print\"Print<\/span><\/a><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Prof. Avi Shmidman of The Joseph and Norman Berman Department of Literature of the Jewish People holds a manuscript from the Cairo Genizah containing a \u201cqerovah poem,\u201d or a poetic alternative to the Shmoneh Esreh, for the 10th of Tevet. The Faculty of Jewish Studies Cracking the Hebrew Code By building AI tools that can […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-283","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-research-innovation","has-post-title","has-post-date","has-post-category","has-post-tag","has-post-comment","has-post-author",""],"builder_content":"

Prof. Avi Shmidman of The Joseph and Norman Berman Department of Literature of the Jewish People holds a manuscript from the Cairo Genizah containing a \u201cqerovah poem,\u201d or a poetic alternative to the Shmoneh Esreh, for the 10th of Tevet.<\/p>\n

The Faculty of Jewish Studies<\/h5>\n

Cracking the Hebrew Code<\/h3>\n

By building AI tools that can navigate the notoriously ambiguous Hebrew language, the linguist, computer scientist, and scholar of medieval Jewish texts Dr. Avi Shmidman is enabling new avenues of inquiry and new perspectives on Jewish life throughout history.\u00a0<\/h6>\n

The Right Man at the Right Time<\/h3>

In 2015, when the field of digital humanities was just starting to take shape, \u201cuniversities were struggling to build teams that had all the component parts,\u201d recalls Dr. Avi Shmidman, a scholar of medieval Jewish poetry who had spent more than a decade building devices for the military avionics sector at the time. \u201cThe Jewish studies researchers wanted computer scientists to help them transcribe and search handwritten texts, but computer scientists insisted they first needed linguists to \u2018disambiguate\u2019 the Hebrew language\u201d\u2014which, explains Shmidman, suffers from \u201cextreme ambiguity\u201d on account of the lack of vowels, attached prefixes, and the absence of capital letters.<\/p>

\u00a0<\/p>

Fortunately, alongside his training in computer science, Shmidman had also previously pursued studies in linguistics. Joking that he was effectively all three team members in one, he seized the opportunity to do what he calls \u201cfoundational work\u201d: Namely, allow scholars to uncover trends, make new connections, and find fruitful new avenues of study within the corpus of Jewish texts.<\/p>

\u201cIn the past,\u201d explains Shmidman, \u201cif a scholar wanted to find all the places where a certain halachic opinion was given, he would have to search through texts himself. There was no way to automate the process, because ensuring relevant results meant that the algorithms had to \u2018understand\u2019 the meaning of the words and structures in every instance.\u201d Now, however, Shmidman\u2019s algorithms can do just that, helping scholars trace back the history of a ruling, a prayer, or an idea, and see the many vicissitudes that shaped the version we have today. This is precisely the goal of the six-year, \u20ac10 million ERC synergy grant awarded jointly in 2022 to Shmidman and his partners at Sciences-Lettres University in Paris and Tel Aviv University, which is developing algorithms capable of extracting text from handwritten Hebrew manuscripts. In addition, the grant\u2019s partners are developing an algorithm for paleography, which can determine when a text was written by the handwritten letters\u2019 shape. Once these algorithms can transcribe, decipher, and catalogue all the ancient texts in the National Library of Israel, they can facilitate the automated searches that lead to new discoveries.<\/p>

\u201cThe path from building devices for military aircraft to digital tools that decipher Jewish texts is certainly unusual,\u201d concedes Shmidman. \u201cBut I like to think that in both cases, I\u2019ve helped the Jewish people to reach new heights.\u201d<\/p>\n\"Fragment\"\n\"Avi\n

Together Again: Joining a Lost Manuscript<\/h6>

Usually, genizah researchers work with online images of fragments and their digitally calculated measurements, which enables the easy identification of parts of the same manuscript. In one instance, however, the digital measurements provided for a Jerusalem Genizah fragment were substantially narrower than those of a Cambridge fragment that Shmidman was certain had originated from the very same codex. Suspecting a mistake, Shmidman inspected the physical specimen (shown here). To his surprise, he found that the edge of the fragment had been folded back against the other side of the page. After carefully unfolding the flap with the archivists at the National Library of Israel, he discovered that its width precisely fit that of the Cambridge fragment; undeniably, these two fragments\u2014stored in two different collections, in two different parts of the world\u2014form one continuous prayer manuscript, now joined together again. His finding was published in Hebrew Union College Annual, a prestigious journal in the field of Jewish studies.<\/p>","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/presidentreport.biu.ac.il\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/presidentreport.biu.ac.il\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/presidentreport.biu.ac.il\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/presidentreport.biu.ac.il\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/presidentreport.biu.ac.il\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=283"}],"version-history":[{"count":57,"href":"https:\/\/presidentreport.biu.ac.il\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3153,"href":"https:\/\/presidentreport.biu.ac.il\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283\/revisions\/3153"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/presidentreport.biu.ac.il\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=283"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/presidentreport.biu.ac.il\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=283"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/presidentreport.biu.ac.il\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=283"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}