WP-01, AthDGC: An Open Diachronic Greek Treebank with Indo-European Parallels

Platform launch report, GlossaContactLab Working Papers, digital edition

Author

Affiliation

Nikolaos Lavidas

National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (NKUA), Division of Language-Linguistics, Department of English Language and Literature, School of Philosophy

Published

May 29, 2026

Abstract

AthDGC (“Athens-PROIEL”) is an open, end-to-end workflow and dataset. It is, to the best of our knowledge, the first openly licensed dependency-parsed treebank of Greek that spans eight diachronic periods, Archaic, Classical, Koine, Late Antique, Byzantine, Late Byzantine, Early Modern, and Modern, under a single PROIEL XML 2.0 schema, with verse-level cross-alignment of the New Testament to Latin (Vulgate), Gothic (Wulfila), Old Church Slavonic (Marianus), and Classical Armenian. AthDGC builds on the PROIEL Treebank Family (Haug & Jøhndal 2008; Eckhoff et al. 2018). Annotation uses Stanford Stanza PROIEL-trained workflows; sentence-level alignment uses LaBSE; word-level alignment uses multilingual-BERT attention via AwesomeAlign. The v0.4 release provides curated samples and the open-source toolkit (LIVE / IN SETUP / FORTHCOMING tiers); the full annotated corpus partitions remain under v0.5 audit on GRNET ARIS. Verified scale and per-witness aligned-verse counts are reported in the v0.5 release notes after the audit pass closes. This Working Paper is the launch report for the AthDGC platform.

Keywords

diachronic linguistics, ancient Greek, Byzantine Greek, Modern Greek, Indo-European, PROIEL, dependency treebank, cross-lingual alignment, argument structure, retranslation

Citation

Lavidas, N., Nikiforidou, K., Haug, D., Kulikov, L., Geka, V., Symeonidis, V., Michalareas, T., Chionidi, S., Tsiropina, A., Plakoutsi, E., Argyropoulos, E. (2026). AthDGC: An Open Diachronic Greek Treebank with Indo-European Parallels. GlossaContactLab Working Papers, digital edition, WP-01. National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (NKUA). 10.5281/zenodo.20439182

@techreport{lavidas2026athdgc,
  type        = {GlossaContactLab Working Paper, digital edition},
  number      = {WP-01},
  author      = {Lavidas, Nikolaos and Nikiforidou, Kiki and Haug, Dag and Kulikov, Leonid and
                 Geka, Vassiliki and Symeonidis, Vassileios and Michalareas, Theodoros and
                 Chionidi, Sofia and Tsiropina, Anastasia and Plakoutsi, Eleni and
                 Argyropoulos, Evangelos},
  title       = {{AthDGC}: An Open Diachronic Greek Treebank with Indo-European Parallels},
  year        = {2026},
  institution = {National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (NKUA)},
  doi         = {10.5281/zenodo.20439182}
}

Full paper

The full text of this Working Paper, method, dataset description, open-access source provenance per period and per IE parallel, IE-parallel matrix, retelling and retranslation chains, tool licence matrix, reuse potential, access + format. acknowledgements, lives at the AthDGC public site:

Read the full launch report at athdgc.github.io/data_paper.html

The same source .qmd renders to HTML, .docx, and (when TinyTeX permits) PDF. This Working Papers entry mirrors the canonical text.

Platform links

Resource	URL
Public showcase	https://athdgc.github.io
Source code	https://github.com/AthDGC/Diachronic-Linguistics-Platform
Stanza (Stanford's open-source Python workflow that automatically tags, lemmatises, and parses sentences) checkpoints (saved snapshots of a trained model)	https://huggingface.co/AthDGC (3 model repos live; weights at v0.5)
PyPI (the Python Package Index, the central archive that pip downloads packages from) toolkit	https://pypi.org/project/athdgc-tools/ (stub 0.4.0.dev0; full v0.5)
Concept DOI (a Digital Object Identifier that always points to the latest version of a deposited record)	10.5281/zenodo.20439182
KEDIVIM autumn 2026 course	https://athdgc.github.io/training.html

Team

Prof. Nikolaos Lavidas (PI, NKUA), Prof. Emerita Kiki Nikiforidou (NKUA; Co-Editor, Genres and Influential Texts volume), Prof. Dag Haug (Oslo; PROIEL Project Director), Prof. Leonid Kulikov (Ghent; Diachronic typology, valency questionnaires), Dr. Vassiliki Geka (NKUA; Post-Doctoral Researcher; Co-Editor, Genres and Influential Texts volume), Dr. Vassileios Symeonidis (NKUA; Post-Doctoral Researcher), Dr. Theodoros Michalareas (NKUA; Post-Doctoral Researcher), Sofia Chionidi (NKUA; PhD Candidate), Anastasia Tsiropina (NKUA; PhD Candidate), Eleni Plakoutsi (NKUA; PhD Candidate), Evangelos Argyropoulos (NKUA; Research Assistant).

Acknowledgements

Funded by the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation (HFRI) under the 3rd Call for HFRI Research Projects to support Post-Doctoral Researchers, Project No. 20577; with complementary support from the Greece 2.0 National Recovery and Resilience Plan. Compute supplied by GRNET ARIS (the Greek national high-performance computing cluster, run by GRNET) (Greek national HPC (high-performance computing, i.e. a cluster of fast machines used for heavy computation)), allocation pa260305. Funded project: CVL-CDSAML, A Corpus-based Valency Lexicon for a Contrastive and Diachronic Study of Ancient and Medieval Languages.