Detecting reported speech as a token classification task: an application to Classical Latin?

AbstractThis paper presents the first application of an automatic token-classification approach for detecting reported speech spans in Classical Latin using transformer-based neural architectures.Focusing on Seneca the Elder’s Declamatory Anthology, the study addresses the text’s highly polyphonic nature, resulting from theuse of reported speech. Instead of relying exclusively on sentence-level syntactic information, the proposed approach treats reported speech detection as a token-level sequence labeling problem. This enables the identification of reported speech spans extending across multiple sentences. We fine-tune three Latin neural language models —LatinBERT, LaBERTa, and PhilBERTa— for binary token-level classification and conduct experiments both with and without punctuation. The results show that RoBERTa-based models effectively identify reported speech, with LaBERTa achieving the best performance (F1 scores above 0.90).