bcv-commons/semantic-neighbors

Hebrew Semantic Neighbor Pairs

7,977 Strong's-number pairs of Biblical Hebrew words judged to be synonyms or same tight semantic concept, at a publication-confidence level reached through three independent verification methods rather than any single signal. CC0 — no restricted sources.

Method

This dataset is the confident subset of a larger semantic-neighbor pipeline that combines ten independent signals: distributional embeddings (BEREL), LXX cross-testament co-rendering, gloss overlap, an LLM scholarly-prior pass, Brown-Driver-Briggs (1906, public domain) etymological roots, T'OMIM poetic-parallelism pairs, Hebrew WordNet, BHSA syntactic structure (coordination/apposition via Context-Fabric), a cross-lingual/Wiktionary-root corroboration tier, and candidates from Radak's Sefer HaShorashim (a 13th-century Public Domain medieval Hebrew root dictionary, via Sefaria). Individually, these signals range from weak (35%) to strong (90%).

Rather than trust any single signal's raw output, a pair is published here only if it passes one of three independent confidence gates:

• cross_signal — asserted by >= 2 methodologically independent signal families (see the gate column). 70.2% SDBH core-agreement on its own.
• llm_verified — pairs that only ever had ONE signal behind them, individually judged by an LLM (Claude Haiku, strict "are these genuinely synonyms in Biblical Hebrew usage" prompt). Only "yes" verdicts included. 69.5% on its own.
• sefer_hashorashim_verified — candidates from Sefer HaShorashim (words Radak discusses together within one root entry), also LLM-verified the same way. 62.9% on its own (its unique contribution after removing overlap with the other two gates).

1,241 pairs pass more than one gate — that subset scores 78.4%, the highest-confidence layer in the dataset (see the gate column, "+"-joined for multi-gate pairs).

Columns

column	meaning
strong_a / strong_b	Hebrew Strong's numbers (H####)
gate	which confidence check(s) this pair passed — cross_signal, llm_verified, sefer_hashorashim_verified, or a "+"-joined combination
n_families	how many independent signal families asserted this pair (0 if only LLM-verified)
llm_verdict	yes if LLM-verified (either LLM gate); blank if published via cross-signal agreement alone

Validation caveat — read before treating the percentages as ground truth

Every accuracy number associated with this pipeline is measured as agreement with SDBH's own domain codes (the Semantic Dictionary of Biblical Hebrew, © United Bible Societies) as an internal proxy — not an independent audit, and not a claim of "correctness." Two things follow:

1. SDBH is a scholarly taxonomy, not exhaustive ground truth — a real synonym pair can fail to share an SDBH domain code simply because SDBH's own domain boundaries split it, and (separately) SDBH data itself is licensed "used with permission" (not CC-BY) and is not included or derivable from this dataset — nothing here reproduces SDBH's domain codes or text.
2. These percentages describe how well this dataset agrees with one particular scholarly resource, not an absolute correctness rate. Treat them as methodology transparency, not a quality guarantee.

License

CC0-1.0. Built from: BDB (1906, public domain), T'OMIM (CC BY 4.0), Hebrew WordNet (Ordan & Wintner, permissive), Wiktionary (CC BY-SA), BHSA/Context-Fabric (public-domain WLC + CC BY 4.0 ETCBC annotation), Sefer HaShorashim (Radak, c.1185-1235 CE, Public Domain, via Sefaria), and an LLM verification pass (Claude Haiku) — none of these require restricted-use attribution beyond what's already satisfied by citing this dataset.

Provenance

Built by shoresh/macula/build_published_pairs.py in bcv-commons/bcv-query.