“Content Elicitation: Towards a New Paradigm for the Analysis and Interpretation of Text.”

The article demonstrates how semantic technologies can be exploited, with the help of user friendly interfaces, to identify and structure the knowledge embedded in literary texts. The proposed approach, here called Content Elicitation, supports the experts in defining hierarchical and associative relationships between semantically annotated chunks of text denoting relevant entities, allowing visual structuring of knowledge, which can be edited by different experts in a collaborative way. This knowledge, formally coded as an ontology, can then be used by scholars and students as a guide for the analysis of the text and for the discovery of potential novel interpretations. This approach is tested on the Babylonian Talmud, due to its historical, linguistic, semantic and structural richness.