Modeling the "Dalet" Clitic in Historical Hebrew Texts: A New Prefix-Segmented BERT Model and Stylistic Analysis
Year: 2026
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: The Aramaic proclitic dalet, widely used in historical Hebrew texts, serves two distinct grammatical functions: as a subordinating conjunction and as a possessive preposition.Because these functions are orthographically identical and no annotated resources exist for this task, large-scale computational analysis of their usage has previously been infeasible.In this paper we introduce a new BERT model for historical Hebrew in which all prefixes are segmented and encoded as independent tokens.This representation allows the model to evaluate proclitics directly and provides a probe-based unsupervised method for determining the grammatical role of the dalet clitic using masked language modeling predictions.We evaluate the approach on a manually annotated dataset drawn from historical Hebrew literature spanning multiple regions and historical periods, achieving over an average F1 score of over 0.89.Applying the method to a corpus of more than 300 million words of historical Hebrew texts, we conduct largescale stylistic analyses of the choice between the Aramaic dalet and available Hebrew alternatives.The results reveal geographic and diachronic trends and identify distinct stylistic clusters within the corpus.The prefixsegmented model and annotated dataset are released for unrestricted use.
Institution: Bar-Ilan University
Subfield: Artificial Intelligence
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Award: G1861717563
OpenAlex ID: W7166822734
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