Semantic Categorization of Segments of Ancient and Mediaeval Zoological Texts

In this paper we present a preliminary work conducted in the framework of the multidisciplinary research network Zoomathia, which aims at studying the transmission of zoological knowledge from Antiquity to the Middle Ages through compilation literature. We propose an approach of knowledge extraction from ancient texts consisting in semantically categorizating text segments based on machine learning methods applied to a representation of segments built by processing their translations in modern languages with Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods and by exploiting a dedicated thesaurus of zoology-related concepts. The final aim is to semantically annotate the ancient texts and reason on these annotations to help epistemologists, historians and philolo-gists in their analysis of these texts.