Bible’s ‘Divine Data’ Could be Perfect for Text Algorithms

New York: Besides being a source of spiritual guidance for many people around the globe, the Bible can also help improve computer-based text translators, researchers say. Using data from the Bible, a team from the Dartmouth College, New Hampshire in the US, developed an algorithm trained on various versions of the sacred texts that can convert written works into different styles for different audiences. The team saw in the Bible “a large, previously untapped dataset of aligned parallel text.” “The English-language Bible comes in many different written styles, making it the perfect source text to work with for style translation,” said lead author Keith Carlson, a doctoral student at Dartmouth. According to the study, this is not the first parallel dataset created for style translation. But it is the first that uses the Bible. Beyond providing infinite inspiration, each version of the Bible contains more than 31,000 verses that the researchers used to produce over 1.5 million unique pairings of the source and target verses for machine-learning training sets. It is already thoroughly indexed by the consistent use of book, chapter and verse numbers. (IANS)