In 1992, a group of researchers at Jerusalem’s Bar Ilan University published a CD-ROM containing a vast corpus of rabbinic literature, allowing scholars and students to search for words and phrases in ways far beyond what could be done with sheer memorization. A new generation of technology is now emerging that, using machine learning, can allow users to do far more with works of Jewish jurisprudence. In conversation with David Bashevkin, the computer scientist and legal scholar Moshe Koppel explains the implications of these new advances. He begins by talking about an existing program call Dicta Maivin, which can make obscure texts less so:
Using our own version of OCR (optical character recognition), specifically adapted to the fonts typical of rabbinic works, Dicta Maivin will convert [a photograph of any segment of a rabbinic text] into digital form. We have the capability of taking a photo of a rabbinic text printed in the 19th century in cramped, difficult-to-read Rashi script, [a font used for printing commentaries], and converting it into text that is legible and easier to understand. Dicta can also insert nikud (vowelization) into a text; it’s hard for some people to read a [Hebrew work] that doesn’t have [these vowel markings], since many words are ambiguous.
Such technologies can also decipher the obscure and often ambiguous abbreviations that pepper rabbinic texts, as well as add punctuation—rendering these works more accessible to the novice. But, Koppel explains, they can also be a boon to the most advanced scholar:
The app basically recreates a scientific edition of rabbinic texts. At the swipe of an icon you can [decipher] abbreviations and see footnotes identifying sources and subsequent quotations of the text. For example, there are later commentators who quote Moses Naḥmanides. If I’m studying a line in Naḥmanides’ commentaries and I want to know every single latter authority who quoted this particular line, I can now easily access that information. You can also see the different ways the Naḥmanides has been quoted. . . . You can actually compare all the different versions with the differences highlighted. Notes and paraphrases of later sources can be systematically identified, and digitized manuscripts can be compared.
Read more on Jewish Action: https://jewishaction.com/cover-story/artificial-intelligence-the-newest-revolution-in-torah-study/