---
title: "Quotations, Relevance and Time Depth: Medieval Arabic"
description: "The authors map how medieval Arabic writers reused one another's texts. 11 references, cited by 2 papers here."
authors: ["Petr Zemánek", "Jiří Milička"]
year: 2014
venue: "Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Literature (CLFL)"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/W14-0903/"
doi: "10.3115/v1/w14-0903"
licence: "CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/zemanek-2014-quotations-relevance-time-depth-medieval/"
---
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# Quotations, Relevance and Time Depth: Medieval Arabic Literature in Grids and Networks

**Authors:** [Petr Zemánek](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/petr-zemanek/) and [Jiří Milička](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/jiri-milicka/) · **Year:** 2014 · **Venue:** [Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Literature (CLFL)](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/workshop-on-computational-linguistics-for-literature/) ([Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Literature 2014](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/workshop-on-computational-linguistics-for-literature/2014/)) · **Publisher:** [Association for Computational Linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/publishers/association-for-computational-linguistics/) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/W14-0903/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/W14-0903.pdf) · [DOI 10.3115/v1/w14-0903](https://doi.org/10.3115/v1/w14-0903) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2251887387)

**Citations:** 3 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14) · [2](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/zemanek-2014-quotations-relevance-time-depth-medieval/cited-by/) in our library, of the 149,439 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
The authors map how medieval Arabic writers reused one another's texts. They treat reused passages, not explicit quotation markers, as evidence that one author read and drew on another. Their data is CLAUDIA, a diachronic historical corpus of Arabic. They built a matcher for repeated passages that does not depend on word order and accepts some lexical and morphological variation, because Arabic is inflectional, its word order is free, and copyists rarely reproduced text exactly. Each pair of works gets a length-normalized link weight. The works are then placed on a grid with a time axis and joined into a weighted network that the authors call semi-directed. Two case studies show what the network can do. One measures centrality and finds that az-Zayla'i, a writer little known today, was a major hub. The other traces how a single work's influence grows and fades over the centuries. The value of the approach is that it measures how much a work was actually used, which can differ sharply from how highly modern scholars rate it.

## Key points
- **Corpus:** CLAUDIA holds about 2,000 complete works and roughly 420 million words of raw, unannotated text from the 7th to the mid-20th century. Author, date and genre were assigned by hand from reference sources, and dates are based on each author's year of death.
- **Matching method:**
  - Passages of 7 to 200 tokens are considered, with up to 10% of word types allowed to differ.
  - For each candidate, the round(0.1n)+1 rarest tokens are looked up in a reverse index, and the text around each hit is checked.
  - Overlapping matches are merged so that longer quotations are also found.
- **Link weight and visualization:** The index Ξ is a log2 score built from the number of quoted tokens, scaled by the lengths of both documents. A parameter h controls how many edges appear in the graph, and the graphs are drawn with Graphviz.
- **Centrality results:**
  - Vol. 2 of az-Zayla'i's *Nasab ar-Raya* has the highest degree centrality (0.0958).
  - For Ibn Xaldun, vol. 3 of his History is the hub, while the *Muqaddima*, much admired today, is isolated in the data.
- **Parameters and caveats:** Settings were chosen by subjective judgment, with the minimum length set above common stock phrases and eulogies, and were not formally evaluated. The authors say small changes barely affect the case studies. They also stress that a missing intermediate text in the corpus can distort the lineage of a quotation.

## Interesting ideas
- Looking up only the rarest few tokens of a window, one more than the number of allowed substitutions, guarantees that at least one exact anchor survives, which makes fuzzy, order-free matching across a huge corpus cheap.
- The minimum match length is deliberately set longer than stock formulas, so that conventional phrases do not create false links.
- Links between nearly contemporary works are left without a direction, and only a clear time gap licenses an arrow, giving a semi-directed graph.
- Multi-volume works are split into separate nodes, which showed that a single volume often carries all the influence.
- Edge weights are normalized by the lengths of both documents and log-scaled, so long texts do not dominate the network simply because they are big.

## For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

- **I1** (learn): Use this to find near-duplicate sentences between silver training data and evaluation sets, so that test contamination is caught even after paraphrase-like edits.
- **I2** (answer): When matching a question against a fable or tale, discount evidence that comes only from formulaic openings or set phrases and require overlap beyond that threshold.
- **I3** (world): In event ordering, keep "unordered" as a valid state when temporal evidence is weak instead of forcing a before/after relation that cannot be explained.
- **I4** (learn): Report evaluation per document section or genre slice rather than one aggregate score, so that localized failures or strengths are visible.
- **I5** (world): Apply similar size normalization when weighting co-occurrence or linking edges in the knowledge graph, so that frequent but long sources do not drown out the rest.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

## Institutions

- [Charles University](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/charles-university/) — University, Prague, Czechia · 134 works · 21,056 citations

📚 Shelves (5): [🎭 Arts and Humanities](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/arts-and-humanities/) · 17,450 works · [🗣️ Language and Linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/arts-and-humanities/language-and-linguistics/) · 17,296 works · [🎯 Decision Sciences](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/decision-sciences/) · 249 works · [📚 Literature and Literary Theory](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/arts-and-humanities/literature-and-literary-theory/) · 541 works · [🎯 Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/decision-sciences/statistics-probability-and-uncertainty/) · 65 works

🧭 Topics (1): [Semitic languages](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/semitic-languages/) · 3,066 works

## Cite

Cite as: Petr Zemánek and Jiří Milička. 2014. Quotations, Relevance and Time Depth: Medieval Arabic Literature in Grids and Networks. Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Literature (CLFL).

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{zemanek2014quotations,
  title = {{Quotations, Relevance and Time Depth: Medieval Arabic Literature in Grids and Networks}},
  author = {Petr Zemánek and Jiří Milička},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Literature (CLFL)},
  year = {2014},
  doi = {10.3115/v1/w14-0903},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3115/v1/w14-0903}
}
```

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- [↑ back to papers of 2014](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2014/page/4/)

## References

11 references, 1 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

1. Kenneth R. Beesley. 2001. Finite-State Morphological Analysis and Generation of Arabic at Xerox Research: Status and Plans in 2001. ACL Workshop on Arabic Language Processing: Status and Perspective. Toulouse, France: 1–8. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Kenneth+R%2E+Beesley%2E+2001%2E+Finite%2DState+Morphological+Analysis+and+Generation+of+Arabic+at+Xerox+Research%3A+Status+and+Plans+in+2001%2E+ACL+Workshop+on+Arabic+Language+Processing%3A+Status+and+Perspective%2E+)
2. Carl Brockelmann. 1996. Geschichte der Arabischen Literatur, (4 Volume Set). Brill, Leiden (1 st edition: 1923). [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Carl+Brockelmann%2E+1996%2E+Geschichte+der+Arabischen+Literatur%2C+%284+Volume+Set%29%2E+Brill%2C+Leiden+%281+st+edition%3A+1923%29%2E)
3. Tim Buckwalter. 2004. [Issues in Arabic Orthography and Morphology Analysis](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/buckwalter-2004-issues-arabic-orthography-morphology-analysis/). The Workshop on Computational Approaches to Arabic Script-based Languages, COLING. Geneva: 31–34.
4. William Paulo Ducca Fernandes, Eduardo Motta and Ruy Luiz Milidiú. 2011. Quotation Extraction for Portuguese. Proceedings of the 8th Brazilian Symposium in Information and Human Language Technology. Cuiabá: 204–208. [↗](https://doi.org/10.17771/pucrio.acad.28807)
5. Okan Kolak and Bill N. Schilit. 2008. Generating Links by Mining Quotations. HT ’08: Proceedings of the nineteenth ACM conference on Hypertext and hypermedia. New York: 117–126. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Okan+Kolak+and+Bill+N%2E+Schilit%2E+2008%2E+Generating+Links+by+Mining+Quotations%2E+HT+%E2%80%9908%3A+Proceedings+of+the+nineteenth+ACM+conference+on+Hypertext+and+hypermedia%2E+New+York%3A+117%E2%80%93126%2E)
6. Kathleen Kuiper. 2010. Islamic Art, Literature and Culture. Rosen Publishing Group. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Kathleen+Kuiper%2E+2010%2E+Islamic+Art%2C+Literature+and+Culture%2E+Rosen+Publishing+Group%2E)
7. Andrew J. Lane. 2005. A Traditional Mu’tazilite Qur’an Commentary: The Kashshaf of Jar Allah al-Zamakhsari (d.538/1144). Brill, Leiden. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Andrew+J%2E+Lane%2E+2005%2E+A+Traditional+Mu%E2%80%99tazilite+Qur%E2%80%99an+Commentary%3A+The+Kashshaf+of+Jar+Allah+al%2DZamakhsari+%28d%2E538%2F1144%29%2E+Brill%2C+Leiden%2E)
8. Silvia Pareti, Tim O’Keefe, Ioannis Konstas, James R. Curran and Irena Koprinska. 2013. Automatically Detecting and Attributing Indirect Quotations. Proceedings of the 2013 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. Seattle: 989– 999. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Silvia+Pareti%2C+Tim+O%E2%80%99Keefe%2C+Ioannis+Konstas%2C+James+R%2E+Curran+and+Irena+Koprinska%2E+2013%2E+Automatically+Detecting+and+Attributing+Indirect+Quotations%2E+Proceedings+of+the+2013+Conference+on+Empirical+Met)
9. Bruno Pouliquen, Ralf Steinberger and Clive Best. 2007. Automatic Detection Of Quotations in Multilingual News. Proceedings of Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing 2007. Borovets. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Bruno+Pouliquen%2C+Ralf+Steinberger+and+Clive+Best%2E+2007%2E+Automatic+Detection+Of+Quotations+in+Multilingual+News%2E+Proceedings+of+Recent+Advances+in+Natural+Language+Processing+2007%2E+Borovets%2E)
10. Xiaolin Shi, Jure Leskovec and Daniel A. McFarland. 2010. Citing for High Impact. Proceedings of the 10th annual joint conference on Digital libraries. New York: 49–58. [↗](https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.1004.3351)
11. Otakar Smrž. 2007. Functional Arabic Morphology. Formal System and Implementation. Doctoral Thesis, Charles University, Prague. Figure 1: Case study: Zayla‘i’s Nasab ar-Raya 3 in its context. Parameter h = 2. Cut out. Figure 2: Case study: the network around the Ibn Xaldun’s works. Parameter h = 1.6667. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Otakar+Smrz%CC%8C%2E+2007%2E+Functional+Arabic+Morphology%2E+Formal+System+and+Implementation%2E+Doctoral+Thesis%2C+Charles+University%2C+Prague%2E+Figure+1%3A+Case+study%3A+Zayla%E2%80%98i%E2%80%99s+Nasab+ar%2DRaya+3+in+its+context%2E+Paramet)

*Updated 1 November 2026*