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SBERT isn't trained on this type of archaic English and you can see it failing. It needs to be fine tuned or you should use a modern Bible translation. A clear
by lalaland1125 4y ago
SBERT isn't trained on this type of archaic English and you can see it failing. It needs to be fine tuned or you should use a modern Bible translation.
A clear example is the query: "homosexuality"
This returns:
> James 2:3 - And ye have respect to him that weareth the gay clothing, and say unto him, Sit thou here in a good place; and say to the poor, Stand thou there, or sit here under my footstool
It's clearly seeing "gay" but is unaware that the meaning has changed.
A classic issue when applying a ML model out of domain.
- stosto88 4y ago
- kadoban 4y agoCouldn't they search in a modern translation and just refer back to the ancient one? Seems like the way bible verses are split up should remove the ability of translation to move anything around much.
- chrislee973 4y agoAh, that's a good idea. I was considering just fully replacing the KJV with the NIV, but for people who want the KJV, having a mapping between the two versions would work. Do the verses between the two versions map each other exactly? Like they cover the same exact thing, just written in a different style?
- Yeroc 4y agoYes, for the majority of the English translations verses map to each other exactly with a few minor exceptions. NIV would map virtually exactly.
- chrismorgan 4y agoTo do this properly, you have to map versifications, because some systems use different conventions. As the most significant and pervasive example, some systems treat the title of psalms as verse one (French generally does this), while others treat it as separate (verse zero, effectively; English generally does this), so if you just reuse numbers across such transitions you’ll get consistent off-by-one errors. There are quite a few other similar off-by-one errors, and occasionally more, throughout. https://wiki.crosswire.org/Alternate_Versification https://wiki.crosswire.org/Alternate_Versification is a decent starting point for looking into the topic, with SWORD’s canon_.h files fairly tolerable for showing the number of verses in each chapter. Unfortunately, SWORD has never gone as far as doing proper mapping* between versifications for some reason—they have some basic mapping somewhere or other, but I can’t remember offhand where or what it is, as I only briefly looked into it five years or so ago. The most significant differences occur when you switch languages (there are quite a few differences if you switch from English to French or to many Indic languages), but there may be some differences between translations within a language too, e.g. SWORD’s NRSV versification has an extra verse in 3 John and Revelation 12 compared to its KJV versification.
- lrvick 4y agoJust remember the NIV translation of The Bible is property of Harper Collins, who is also amusingly the publisher of many tabloids and The Satanic Bible. I used to distribute a BibleGateway-ripped copy of NIV as a plugin for the open source GnomeSword project and managed to upset both Harper Collins and the open source scholar community. It was absurd and I refused to stop. I dared them to sue me for sharing the Bible as open source... the headlines would write themselves. FWIIW they never took the bait, but expect empty threat Cease and Desist letters from the Harper Collins legal team.
- pbhjpbhj 4y agoI thought NIV was Zondervan, bought (as you intimate) by News International (Rupert Murdoch). What I hadn't realised is Harper Collins owns Zondervan and Murdoch controls that.
- JasonFruit 4y agoSince a few verses are in the KJV but not the NIV, some would never appear in searches.
- chrislee973 4y agoHey, creator of the Bible Semantic Search app here. I 100% agree with you. I hacked together this prototype for the purposes of learning the Pinecone API rather than fine-tuning a language model, but I'm still pleasantly surprised by the quality of the search results despite all the shortcomings you mentioned. The results aren't great, but they're decent. I'm surprised how well SBERT works out of the box considering I haven't done any fine-tuning whatsoever, and like you said, it doesn't fully understand the KJV's archaic writing style. Switching to a version that uses more modern English like the NIV is trivial so maybe I'll do that.
- mikeytown2 4y agoGo with the ESV or NASB as these are word for word translations similar to the KJV. There's also the NKJV that uses modern english. Can use modern translations on the backend and still display the KJV verse.
- jordanmoconnor 4y agoMost of these newer translations have licensing restrictions that prevent you from simply using them.
- dotancohen 4y agoDo those licenses apply to using them on the backend, though? Assuming that the site displays the classic verse, and not the copyrighted verse, as GP prescribes.
- anjbe 4y agoI suppose that would be the same question as whether GitHub Copilot violates copyright in its code suggestions.
- swasheck 4y agosblgnt is a decent basis for literary analysis but it’s NT only. the non-trivial part of your work is to navigate the oddly byzantine bible licensing considerations