We develop the Classical Language Toolkit (CLTK) because we believe it is revolutionizing the study of the ancient world. It is doing so by removing barriers to entry for those doing natural language processing (NLP) in Classical languages (namely, the surviving literature of the entirety of Eurasia and north Africa, from roughly 3000 B.C. to A.D. 1500).

Due to how academic disciplines have evolved over the past 200 years, our earliest civilizations are often studied in isolation from one another. This is tragic, for today we know that the ancient world – from Rome to Mesopotamia to India to China – consisted of deeply interconnected networks of ideas, technologies, art, and beliefs. As a framework for multidisciplinary research, the CLTK will help scholars discover the commonalities of what were once thought disparate cultures.

As software, the CLTK is a suite of NLP tools suited to the special needs of ancient languages. We have have three goals: The most basic is to offer low-level libraries for doing NLP in particular Classical languages (e.g., Ancient Greek, Sanskrit). Developed with an extensible architecture, our code is easily hacked to support new languages. Second, the CLTK offers tools for students and scholars to do reproducible scientific research. For instance, it has version-controlled linguistic corpora and a suite of functions for stylometrics. Third, it is a framework for multidisciplinary language research. With pre-trained models (such as Word2Vec for vector space models), we provide easy-to-use tools to capture the transmission and evolution of knowledge, from the earliest human societies to the dawn of the modern era.