NEReus is an annotated corpus of ancient Greek Named Entities developed to train neural models. The corpus is in alpha stage and consists only of the annotated version of Herodotus's Histories Book III. The project aims to provide NER annotations of the following text in ancient Greek:

• [x] Hesiod's Theogony

• Herodotus' Histories

  • [x] Book I

  • [ ] Book II

  • [x] Book III

• Diogenes Laertius' Lives of Eminent Philosophers

  • [x] Book I
  • [ ] Book III
  • [ ] Book V
  • [ ] Book VII

• [ ] Selected passages from Pausanias' Description of Greece

• [ ] Selected passages from Strabo's Geography

The annotation schema of NEReus consists of the labels NORP, GOD, GPE, LANGUAGE, LOC, PERSON whose description is the following:

The label NORP refers to adjectives that denote:

• Ethnic groups like Greeks, Egyptians, Persians, etc. NORP contains then ethnonyms both in the singular and the plural.
• Demonyms, this is, terms used to denote the natives or inhabitants of a particular city, city-state, or sub-division of a city-state like the demos or tribes are also labeled as NORP
• Other social groups, like philosophical schools, religious organizations like thiasi, organized temple personnel, groups of doctors, and similar, are also labeled as NORP.
• Exceptions are substantivized adjectives in the singular that function as a proper noun like in ὁ Φοῖνιξ, "the Phoenician." Such cases are labeled as PERSON, and the label must include the article, as is the case of ὁ Φοῖνιξ.

In contrast to modern NER corpora, NEReus annotates the names of gods and other supernatural beings. This is so because people in the ancient world perceived many divine beings as real things to which they related in various forms. A critical form of relating to the gods was kinship: some individuals, for instance, imagined that they had divine ancestry.

The category LANGUAGE includes terms denoting both languages and any language's dialects.

As LOC are annotated the names of cities, nations, empires, and city-states. The label LOC is also used to annotate mountains, caves, bodies of water, and any location. Note that ethnonyms, like Athenians, sometimes used to denote places, are annotated as NORP to avoid inconsistencies. For instance, in a sentence like "The messenger went to the Egyptians," Egyptians are labeled as NORP and not LOC, although 'Egyptians' here denotes Egypt.

Although groups of citizens, religious groups, philosophical schools, and guilds (professional associations) are technically organizations, they are labeled as NORP. The label ORG is reserved for the name of ships like the Argos, governmental bodies such as the Athenian boule or the Spartan gerousia, military alliances like the Delian League or the Peloponnesian League, as well as festivals like the Olympic games or the Dionysia, which involved complex organization and participation from various city-states.

The label person is applied to proper names or substantivized adjectives that denote individuals. For the latter case, see above under NORP.